Book review: The Measure of All Things

“The Measure of All Things“ by Ken Alder tells the story of Pierre Méchain and Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre’s efforts to survey the line of constant longitude (or meridian) between Dunkerque and Barcelona through Paris, starting amidst the French Revolution in 1792.

The survey of the meridian was part of a scheme to introduce a new, unified system of measures. The idea was to fix the length of the new unit, the metre, as 1/10,000,000th of the distance between the North Pole and the equator on a meridian passing through Paris.

At the time France used an estimated 250,000 different measures across the country with each parish having it’s own (uncalibrated) weights and measures with different measures for different types of material i.e. a “yard” of cotton was different from a “yard” of silk, and different if you were buying wholesale or selling to end users. These measures had evolved over time to suit local needs, but acted to supress trade between communities. Most nations found themselves in a similar situation.

Although the process of measuring the meridian started under the ancien regime, it continued in revolutionary France as a scheme that united the country. The names associated with the scheme: Laplace, Legrendre, Lavoisier, Cassini, Condorcet, leading lights of the Academie des Sciences, are still well known to scientists today.

Such surveying measurements are made by triangulation, a strip of triangles is surveyed along the line of interest. This involves precisely measuring the angles between each each vertex of the triangles in succession: given the three angles of a triangle and the length of one side of the triangle the lengths of the other two sides can be calculated. It’s actually only necessary to measure the length of one side on one triangle on the ground. Once you’ve done that you can use the previously determined lengths for successive triangles. All of France had been surveyed under the direction of César-François Cassini in 1740-80, the meridian survey used a subset of these sites measured at higher precision thanks to the newly invented Borda repeating circle. As well as this triangulation survey a measure of latitude was made at points along the meridian by examining the stars.
The book captures well the feeling of experimental measurement: the obsession with getting things to match up via different routes; the sick feeling when you realise you’ve made a mistake perhaps never to be reversed; the frustration at staring at pages of scribbles trying to find the mistake; the pleasure in things adding up.

Méchain and Delambre split up to measure the meridian in two sections: Delambre taking the northern section from Dunkerque to Rodez and Méchain the section from Rodez to Barcelona. Méchain delayed endlessly throughout the project, trusting little measurement to his accompanying team. Early on in the process, at Barcelona, he believed he had made a terrible error in measurement, but was unable to check whilst Spain and France were at war. He was wracked by doubt for the following years, only handing over doctored notes with great reluctance at the very end of the project. He was to die not long after the initial measurements were completed, leaving his original notes for Delambre to sift through.

At the time the measurements were originally made the understanding of experimental uncertainty, precision and accuracy were poorly developed. Driven in part by the meridian project and similar survey work by Gauss in Germany, statistical methods for handling experimental error more rigorously were developed not long afterwards. I wrote a little about this back here. Satellite surveying methods show that the error in the measurement by Méchain and Delambre is equivalent to 0.2 millimetres in a metre or 0.02%.

In the end the Earth turns out not to be a great object on which to base a measurement system: although it’s pretty uniform it isn’t really uniform and this limits the accuracy of your units. The alternative proposed at the time was to base the metre on a pendulum: it was to have the length necessary to produce a pendulum of period 2 seconds. This is also ultimately based on properties of the Earth since the second was defined as a certain fraction of the day (the time the Earth takes to rotate on its axis) and the local gravity which varies slightly from place to place, as Maskelyne demonstrated. 

Following the Revolution, France adopted, for a short time, a decimal system of time as well as metric units but these soon lapsed. However, the new metric units were taken up across the world over the following years - often this was during unification following war and upheaval.

The definition of the basic units used in science is still an active area. The definition of the metre has not relied on a unique physical object since 1960, rather it is defined by a process: the distance light travels in a small moment of time. However, the kilogram is still defined by a physical object but this may end soon with some exquisitely crafted silicon spheres.

I must admit to being a bit wary of this book in the first instance, how interesting can it be to measure the length of a line? However, it turns out I like to read history through the medium of science and the book provides an insight into France at the Revolution. Furthermore measuring the length of a line is interesting, or it is to a physicist like me.

Thanks to @beckyfh for recommending it!

Footnotes
1. The full-text of the three volume “Base du système métrique décimal" written by Delambre is available online. The back of the second volume contains summary tables of all the triangles and a diagram showing their locations.
2. The author’s website.
3. Some locations in Google Maps.

Book review: The Ascent of Money

This blog post is my review and notes on “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World” by Niall Ferguson. It’s a thematic run through the key elements of our current global finance system which ends with subprime mortgages and the present day.

Money, tokens representing value, started with the clay tablets of Mesopotamia as “promissory notes” for goods some 4000 years ago. For a very long time the basis of all money was precious metals such as gold and silver, it’s only been in the last 40 years or so that the link to gold has been broken for major currencies. The Spanish were burnt by metal coin when they started extensive mining for silver in South America – devaluing the coin in Europe through excess supply.

Fibonacci helped to introduce Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe in 1202 through his book, Liber Abaci, which contained commercial calculations including currency and interest rates. Many of the early bankers were Jewish, they were legally restricted from taking part in many sorts of commerce and, through usury laws, the Christians were unable to lend but Jews could (their usury laws restricting lending to other Jews). Banking really took off with the Medici family during the 15th century, originally they dealt in foreign currency but diversified and, critically, became big. Size was important, because large size reduces risk.

Banking innovation then moved north from Italy with three innovations: the Amsterdam Exchange Bank (1609) introduced a standard currency, the Stockholm Banco (1657) started lending and then the Bank of England (1694) started issuing notes which meant there was no need for an account with the bank.

This is followed by the issuing of government bonds, these are essentially the way governments raise debt. Bonds have a face value – and an annual percentage return on their face value but the price at which they are sold in the market may vary. They were initially used by governments to raise money for wars. Rothschild bank made it’s money in this way in the early 19th century. Bonds are seen as very secure investments, but governments do default – most recently the Russia government in 1998.

The final innovation was the limited-liability company, a way by which individuals could band together to undertake longer term projects without risking everything (they only risked the value of their shares). The first of these was the Dutch East India Company founded in 1602 – formed to conduct the spice trade with the Far East (a risky and expensive business). In theory the directors and shareholders hold the company to account but in practice the value of the company shares on the stock market is the real control.

The first great stock market bubble was the Mississippi Company in France and was led by a Scotsman, John Law. Along with with control of the company he also exerted considerable control over the Banque Royale – the French national bank. The result was a system of share sales which spiralled completely out of control with the central bank making almost daily changes in its rules to enable the sale of more shares in the Mississippi company or to support their price. Ultimately the whole system crashed in 1720; Ferguson argues that this led in part to the French Revolution since the whole performance put the French off exciting financial innovations which could have lead to a more stable system.

Ferguson identifies five stages to a speculative bubble:

1. Displacement – something changes which leads to a new economic opportunity.
2. Euphoria – prices start to spiral upwards.
3. Mania – first time buyers rush in and fall prey to swindlers.
4. Distress – insiders realise the game is up and start to leave.
5. Revulsion – everyone else realises the game is up and try too leave too. The bubble bursts.

The depressing thing is that people have been dutifully following these five steps for nearly 300 years!

Next up is insurance, and scientific developments in statistics make an appearance. Ferguson focuses on the Scottish Widows insurance scheme, set up in 1744, to pay pensions to the widows of Scottish clergymen. Although he introduces a wide range of statistical developments including work by Pascal, Bernoulli's (Jacob and Daniel), de Moivre and Bayes it seems to me the key development were the mortality tables compiled by John Graunt in 1662.

The presence of numerate scientists should not be seen as a panacea though, the Black-Scholes equation for pricing options looks like a piece of thermodynamics: Merton and Scholes won a Nobel Prize for it (Black missed out having died) nevertheless over-enthusiastic application of this equation lead to a fairly serious crash.

Ferguson comments that we are currently in a second round of globalisation, prior to the First World War financial markets were already fairly globalised although quite often under circumstances of colonisation. The outbreak of war necessitated a substantial increase in government support and intervention in the markets and after the war difficult economic circumstances made it easy to continue with this.

It’s interesting to note that the idea of the property owning democracy grew out of the New Deal in the US in the 1930’s prior to that time only 40% of householders in the US were homeowners – the figure now approaches 70%. The same has happened in the UK, although somewhat later with fewer than half of people homeowners in 1970 and a level of approximately 70% now. In a sense the subprime mortgage lending that led to the recent recession is the final playing out of this policy. Ferguson is clearly not too enamoured of the property-owning democracy – seeing it as an over-concentration on a single asset class.

I found this a nice background to understanding economics, it shows how various financial innovations were introduced and how they can contribute to a successful economy. It also highlights how the misuse of such innovations can lead to financial disaster, and does so with depressing frequency. The chronology through the book is not very clear, I suspect he expands on particular instances that best illustrate his point rather focusing on first introduction. Although it has extensive notes and indexes, it could do with a glossary.

Inordinately fond of bottles...

J.B.S. Haldane, when asked “What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?”, he replied:
“I’m not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.”

The National Museum of Science & Industry (NMSI) has recently released a catalogue of its collection in easily readable form, you can get it here. The data includes descriptions, types of object, date made, materials, sizes, and place made - although not all objects have data for all these items. Their intention was to give people an opportunity to use the data, now who would do such a thing?

The data comes in four 16mb CSV files plus a couple of other smaller ones covering the media library (pictures) and a small "events" library. I've focussed on the main catalogue. You can load these files individually into Microsoft Excel, each one has about 65536 rows so they're a bit of a pain to use, alternatively you can upload them to a SQL database. This turns out to be exceedingly whizzy! I wrote a few blog posts about SQL a while back as I learnt about it and this is my first serious attempt to use it. Essentially SQL allows you to ask nearly human language looking questions of big datasets, like this:

USE sciencemuseum;
SELECT collection,
       COUNT(collection)
FROM   sciencemuseum.objects
GROUP  BY collection
ORDER  BY COUNT(collection) DESC
LIMIT  0, 11000; 


This gets you a list of all the collections inside the Science Museums catalogue (there are 162) and tells you how many objects are in each of these collections. Collections have names like "SRM - Acoustics" and "NRM - Railway Timepieces", the NMSI incorporates the National Railway Museum (NRM), and the National Media Museum (NMEM) as well as the Science Museum (SCM) - hence the first three letters of the collection name. I took the collection data and fed it into Many Eyes to make a bubble chart:


The size of the bubble shows you how many objects are in a particular collection, you can see a majority of the major collections are medical related.

So what's in these collections? As well as longer descriptions, many objects are classified into a more limited number of types. This bubble chart shows the number of objects of each type:


This is where we learn that the Science Museum is inordinately fond of bottles (or jars, or specimen jars, or albarello's or "shop rounds"). There are also a lot of prints and posters, from the National Railway Museum. This highlights a limitation to this type of approach: the fact that there are many of an object tells you little. It perhaps tells you how pervasive medicine has been in science - it is the visible face of science and has been for many years.

I have also plotted when the objects in the collection were made:

This turns out to be slightly tricky since over the years different curators have had different ideas about how *exactly* to describe the date when an object was made. Unsurprisingly in the 19th century they probably didn't consider that a computer would be able to process 200,000 records in 1/4 second but simultaneously be unable to understand that circa 1680, c. 1680, c1680, ca 1680 and ca. 1680 actually all mean the same thing. This shows a number of objects in the first few centuries AD, followed by a long break and gradual rise after 1600 - the period of the Scientific Revolution. The pace picks up once again at the beginning of the 19th century.

I also made a crack at plotting where all the objects originating in the UK came from, on PC this is a live Google Map and is zoomable, beneath the red bubbles are disks sized in proportion to the number of objects from that location:

From this I learnt that there was a Pilkingtons factory in St Asaph, and a man in Chirk made railway models. To me this is the value of programming, the compilers of the catalogue made decisions as to what they included but once in my hands I can look into the catalogue according to my interests. I can explore in my own way, if I were a better programmer I could perhaps present you with a slick interface to do the same.

Finally for this post, I tried to plot when the objects arrived at the museum, this was a bit tricky: for about 60% of the objects the object reference number for objects contains the year as the first four characters so I just have the data for these:

The Science Museum started in 1857, the enormous spike in 1889 is due to the acquisition of the collection of Sir John Percy on his death, I discovered this on the the Science Museum website. Actually, I'd like to commend the whole Science Museum site to you, it's very nice.

I visited the Science Museum a number of times in my childhood, I must admit to preferring it to the Natural History Museum, which seemed to be overwhelming large. The only record I have of these visits is this picture of a German Exchange visit to the museum, in 1985:

I must admit to not being a big fan of museums and galleries, they make my feet ache and I can't find what I'm looking for or I don't know what I'm looking for, and there never seems to be enough information on the things I'm looking at. This adventure into the data is my way of visiting a museum, I think I'll spend a bit more time in wandering around the museum.

I had an alternative title for people who had never heard of J.B.S. Haldane: "It's full of jars"

Footnote
If the Many Eyes visualisation above don't work, you can see them in different formats from my profile page.

Book review: Doomsday Men by P.D. Smith

My next book review is on Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by P.D. Smith. I arrived at this book via the comments on my earlier post about the Manhattan Project, the Allied project to develop the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. I also wrote about science fiction, which is relevant to this book too.

Doomsday Men brings context to the Manhattan Project, it shows the early imagining of what radioactivity could bring in terms of weapons of war, it shows science fiction writers foreseeing the applications, politicians considering the practical use of weapons of mass destruction and scientists working towards them. Alongside atomic weapons the potential for war from the air had been well considered before it was implemented.

The book starts with the conception of a genuine doomsday superweapon, that’s to say one that would wipe out all life on earth. This had been a theme of science fiction in the past, but in the early 1950’s it became plausible. Essentially the trick is to set off a fusion explosion in the presence of a large quantity of a particular element, cobalt, which would pick up neutrons becoming intensely radioactive whilst being vapourised and cast up into the atmosphere to settle the world over providing a lethal dose of radiation. The amount of cobalt required is about 10,000 tonnes which is only a cube with sides 10 metres long. There’s an open question as to whether the dust would be distributed uniformly enough to wipe out all life.

Leo Szilard is a central character through the book, along with fellow Hungarians John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, known collectively as the Hungarian Quartet. They arrived in the US, fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe and were to play an important part in the development of nuclear weapons. It’s very striking the number of European Jews who migrated to the US in the period after the First World War, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. In the first instance many of them were keen to help in the development of nuclear weapons as a response to Hitler’s rise in Germany: a state they believed had both the technical ability to make such weapons and, with Hitler, the will to use them in war. Towards the end of the Second World War many of them felt less enthusiastic about their use against the Japanese, despite Japan’s hideous development and use of biological weapons against the Chinese in the 1930’s. Following the war, Von Neumann and particularly Teller continued to be involved in further developments now driven by anti-Communism sentiments. 

The route to the doomsday weapon started with the discovery of radioactivity towards the end of the 19th century, and in particular the discovery of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie at the turn of the century. Around 1902 Frederick Soddy and Sir William Crookes both highlighted the huge amounts of energy was bound up in matter. Crookes saying: “one gram could raise the entire fleet of the British Navy several thousand fleet in the sky”. By 1913 H.G. Wells had very explicitly written about a nuclear weapon in “A World Set Free”. The use of chemical weapons, tanks and aeroplanes in war had all been imagined well before they were used too. Clearly there are big technical issues to address in going from a science fiction idea to a real system in battle, but the point here is that these ideas had serious public currency well before they were realised: there could be no “we’ll keep this quiet and no-one will think of it”. In a sense the key theme of the book is the interweaving of fiction with fact through the first half of the 20th century.

It was during the First World War that “scientific” superweapons started to be used, and the importance of science in waging war started to be recognised explicitly. Fritz Haber, a chemist, Nobel prize-winner for his commercial synthesis of ammonia, contemporary of Einstein, was instrumental in bringing chemical weapons to war, he was a German nationalist and felt the development of such weapons a duty to his country. He seemed quite enthusiastic about his work, writing:

“Chlorine: easy to liquefy, disastrous to the human organism, very cheap, mind you! Phosgene: ten times as strong as chlorine. Mustard gas: the best fighting gas of all”.

Once the Germans had used chemical weapons the British and French quickly developed their own. Research and manufacture of chemical weapons was to involve up to 75,000 people by the end of the war – this is about half the number involved in the Manhattan Project. A minority of scientists considered chemical warfare as a blessing compared to the conventional equivalent, for many others it was utterly abhorrent. The military had mixed feelings. Chemical weapons were banned by a variety of treaties, practically they seemed something of a double-edged sword with the first British use of chlorine at Loos causing 2000 casualties on their own side which perhaps explains why they’ve been so rarely used since. With the rise of Nazism Haber, a Jew, was to flee Germany and die shortly thereafter.

The First World War also saw the foundation of the British Board of Invention and Research in 1916, tasked with finding science to fight wars – it sought ideas from the public, one of the which was to train cormorants to peck out the mortar between bricks!

Biological weapons were to be developed by the Japanese whilst at war in China during the 1930’s and the Second World War, in an effort led by Shiro Ishii. During this period thousands were to die through his work, many in a range of human experiments to match those carried out by the Nazi doctors. Following the Second World War Ishii was given immunity from prosecution in order that the US could obtain information on biological weapons from him.

So chemistry and biology produced rather unpleasant weapons but they could not be described as decisive: for that you need physicists.

Szilard was first to realise (in 1933) that an atomic bomb might be made via a chain reaction: the fission of an atomic nucleus producing two or more neutrons which would drive further fission. He made some effort to keep the idea secret, at least from the Germans, via a patent held by the British Admirality. This was a very unusual move for a scientist in an area of pure science. In 1939 he was to visit Roosevelt with Einstein to warn him of the potential for an atomic bomb and the possibility that the Germans would make one. Ultimately this contact led to the Manhattan Project and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: killing at least 200,000 people.

One of the recurring themes in fiction was the idea of a scientist discovering the doomsday weapon and then holding the world to ransom for peace with the new “system of the world”: a world government led by scientists and technocrats. This sort of idea is better described as left-wing rather than right-wing. And I can say, as a scientist, that it has a certain appeal! Perhaps this explains something of why scientists are more often perceived as left-wing rather than right-wing.

Doomsday Men ends with the story of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr Strangelove: or How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Bomb”. The title character appears to have been based on a combination of Teller, von Neumann and perhaps Werner von Braun – the German rocket scientist captured by the Americans who went on to found the US space programme.

Overall a rather good read: providing good context to the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, and the importance of science fiction in seeing into the future.

Footnote: one of the drawbacks of reading on a Kindle: I reached the end rather unexpectedly since the footnotes, bibliography, and index take up a third of the book!

Far, far away

This week I have journeyed into the heart of darkness.

Actually it was my company's IT outsourcing system. I work for a very big company: it has about 150,000 employees spread across the world. I work in north west England amongst other things I look after a little unit which uses a particular piece of bespoke software, the unit involves seven people in an office a couple of hundred metres from where I sit at work. The tale of our new bespoke software is long and tortuous and I won't go into it here but to relate my adventures in getting the test version of the software copied onto the live system today.

The servers on which this software resides are located in North Wales (15 miles away) and a spot down the road about 8 miles away. The outsourcing of our IT services means that the manager for this process is located in the Netherlands, and the person actually doing the process, Supriya, is in India. I can tell she is in India because she has an Indian phone number. Her e-mail signature says her "office base" is in North Wales, it must be a bit inconvenient having your "office base" in North Wales, a location I suspect Supriya has never visited, and a phone in India. Do my company think I am some sort of dribbling BNP little Englander who would dissolve in rage if I thought I was dealing with someone in India? I regularly work with people from China, France and even the US, trying to obfuscate where someone works is frankly patronising and offensive - particularly if you do it so ineptly.

I've spoken to Supriya before - she's a friendly and helpful lass but she doesn't half ask some odd questions: "Could I confirm that Ireland was not going to be impacted by the change I had requested?". "Had I notified NL service mfgpro(users)?" Just to be clear: I have no idea how Ireland might be affected or who the "NL service mfgpro(users)" are, these aren't recognised code words for me. I clearly provided the right answer in these cases because I was informed that both Ireland and the Benelux countries had given their approval. But the fear arises in my mind: I've not cleared things with the Austro-Hungarian Empire - could I have inadvertently started World War III? This is yet to be determined.

The process doesn't go entirely smoothly, largely because Supriya is too polite to tell me that the procedure she'd been asked to carry out throws up some errors. I can't help because I'm not given permissions to see the servers where the software resides, Supriya has a difficult time because she has no absolutely idea what the software does. However, with the help of  James, who wrote the software, based in Manchester but whose boss is in Sunderland we do manage to get everything sorted out by the end of the day (or about 10pm in Supriya's time zone).

This is not an isolated incident: receipts for my travel claims are sent to Iron Mountain (a company just outside Birmingham) where they are converted to electronic form before being sent to Manila (I can't help thinking this may have been due to a misunderstanding involving envelopes) and paid via India. In a fit of tidiness I once decided to get a stash of 6 computers removed from a desk in my office: they'd been left by a sequence of unnamed, and now forgotten contractors. I received endless fractious e-mails from a centre in Bulgaria, belonging to the leasing company, demanding to know who all these computers belonged to, or why I appeared to be in possession of 6 computers.

The old way of doing things involved a prescriptive system of doing stuff where you filled in a form and it went through a process and something got done. But actually it didn't, actually you learnt who was going to do what you wanted, went over for a little chat whereby you found out what incantation you needed to inject into the system in order to get your job squared with the system whilst they got on and did the job. Outsourcing frequently loses this human contact, in fact it purposefully eliminates it.

An Ethical Foreign Policy

Saddam Hussein helped me to understand the role of the UN and the nation state when he gassed the inhabitants of the Iraqi town of Helabja in 1988. I was 18, and it was the first time I ever saw a dead body on TV. The attack killed something like 5,000 people and injured many more. The reaction of my own country, the UK, it’s allies and the UN was muted and in some quarters seemed to involve trying to blame the Iranians, with whom Iraq was at war.

Then the realisation struck: the UN pretty much leaves you to your own devices within your own borders because to do otherwise would seriously worry its member states. Fancy mandating the interference of a league of nations into your country’s affairs? Because once the principle is established then quite a large fraction of the members of the UN could find calls for interference within their borders. And if you think that sort of response is just for nasty countries like Russia and China, then observe the British response to European Court of Human Rights judgements against it.

Another formative event for me was the end of the first Gulf War: after Iraqi forces had been ejected from the recently invaded Kuwait. The Allied forces were heading towards Baghdad, the Iraqi people were rising up against their leader. And then we stopped and I remember John Major giving a press conference saying, when asked about supporting the Iraqis against their leader, “I don’t remember asking them to revolt” or words to that effect. Surely this, more than any other, was a time to act ethically, to depose the tyrant rather than pop him back in his box with the people of Iraq, a bulwark against our greater Satan: Iran. Invade another country: very bad, but do what you want inside your own borders.

A motivating factor for this post is the wave of revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya triggered, it seems by poor economic circumstances, and perhaps the success of other democratic revolutions. Largely these are countries with whom we’ve been happy to do business, Tunisia and Egypt are even popular tourist destinations.

Libya has been ruled by Gaddafi for the last 42 years, he has always seemed to be genuinely quite bonkers and was a great enemy of the UK for a number of years (supporting the IRA, and responsible for the shooting of Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy). More recently he has been back in favour but now he’s back out of favour again. Who can keep up with all these changes? His return to favour in 2004 was stimulated by his renunciation of “weapons of mass destruction” and support for the “War on Terror”. It’s interesting that in his recent speech he tried to hit that button again to regain support from his old allies in the West.

Egypt has long been a friend of the West, largely because it has taken the lead amongst Arab nations in maintaining diplomatic relationship with Israel. For this we conveniently ignore its not particularly good democratic and human rights record. Now the people have managed to oust Hosni Mubarak it turns out that as a nation we weren’t all that keen – who knew? It must be more than a little galling to the opposition in Egypt that we’re willing to show how much we support them just when that support is no longer needed.

Mixed in with all this is David Cameron is off to the Middle East for an arms fair; we’re often told that the weapons, tear gas, rubber bullets that we sell to nations will definitely not be used to suppress their own populations. Quite why we should think this is even remotely plausible I don’t understand. Did the nice dictator promise not to use them against his own population? What else is he going to do with them?

It would be nice to think we could run a foreign policy whereby we didn’t support people who weren’t very nice and in fact actively sought their removal from office perhaps by more widespread use of travel restrictions and financial embargoes on the leadership, as we seem to be heading with Libya now.

Working out which countries are nice and which are nasty shouldn’t be too hard: we could use the Democracy Index, perhaps the Press Freedom Index, or even the use of the death penalty as a proxy. Indices such as this are always going to be a bit subjective but the same cast appear at the bottom again and again.

I can’t help thinking that across the world people of many nations remember; they remember who we supported and who we didn’t. We in Britain remember, just look at our media regarding Germany, and that was over 60 years ago. Just think what the people of other countries will remember in the years to come.

Photographs, videos and GPS

This post is in part a memory aid but it may be interesting to other amateur photographers, and organisational obsessives.

My scheme for holidays and walks out is to take cameras (Canon 400D, Casio Exilim EX-S10), sometimes a video camera (Canon Legaria FS200) and a Garmin GPS 60 which I use to provide information for geotagging photos rather than navigation, although I once used it as an altimeter to find the top of a cloud covered Lake District mountain. Geotagging is the process of labelling a camera image with the location at which it was taken.

I save images as JPEG, I should probably use RAW format on the SLR but the workflow is more complicated and I rarely do anything particularly advanced with images after I’ve taken them other than cropping, straightening and a little fiddling with contrast. Once home I save all the images from a trip to a directory whose name is as follows:

Z:\My Pictures\[year]\[sequence number] – [description] – [date]

So for my recent skiing trip:

Z:\My Pictures\2011\003 - Hinterglemm – 29jan11

I leave the image file names unaltered. Padding the sequence number with zeroes helps with sorting. The idea of this is that I can easily find photos of a particular trip just using the “natural” ordering of the file system, I don’t rely on 3rd party software and I’m fairly safe from the file system playing sneaky tricks with creation dates. The Z: drive on my system is network attached storage, so it can be accessed from both my desktop and laptop computers. I back this up to the D: drive on my desktop PC using Syncback and I also copy it periodically to a portable drive which I keep at work. Syncback synchronises the files in two directories, I use this in preference to “proper” backup because it doesn’t leave my files in a big blob of an opaque backup format (I got burnt by this when using NTbackup in the past). The drawback is that I can’t go back to a snapshot in time but I’ve never felt the need to do this.

In addition to the images, I also save the GPS file in GPX format to the directory, this is downloaded and converted using Mapsource which is Garmin’s interfacing software. GPX is a format based on XML so is easy to read programmatically and even by humans. I do little inside Mapsource other than converting, and for a multi-session trip, stitching all the tracks together into a single file. Another handy tool in this area is GPSBabel which converts GPS data between a multitude of formats.

I use Picasa for photo viewing and labelling: it’s free, it has basic editing functions, it allows labelling and geotagging of photos in a fairly open manner and it does interesting stuff like face recognition too. As well as all this it links to Google’s web albums, so I can share photos, and it talks nicely to Google Earth.

Both geotagging and labelling images use EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) this is a way of adding metadata to images; nice because it’s a standard and the data goes in the image file so can’t get lost. EXIFtool is a very useful command-line tool for reading and writing EXIF data, and it can be integrated into your own programs. Software like Picasa, and websites such as Flickr are EXIF aware so data saved in this format can be visible in a range of applications. 

It is possible to geotag photos manually with Picasa via Google Earth but I’ve collected a GPS track so this is not necessary. There are free software packages to do this but I’ve written my own for fun. The process is fairly simple: the GPS track has a timestamp associated with each location point and the photos from the camera each have a timestamp. All the geotagging software has to do is find the GPS point with the timestamp closest to that of the photo and write that location data to the image file in the appropriate EXIF fashion. The only real difficulty is matching up the offset between image time and GPS time - for this I take a picture of my GPS which shows what time it thinks it is and label this “GPS”.

In fact I usually label photos after they have been geotagged: photos can be exported from Picasa as a Google Earth compatible KMZ file and then upload into Google Earth along with the GPS track in GPX format making it possible to see where you were when you took the photo, which makes labelling easier.

I use www.gpsvizualiser.com to create images of GPS tracks on top of satellite images, this is a bit more flexible than just using Google Earth, I must admit to being a bit bewildered with the range of options available here. Below is an example where height is coded with colour.

As I go around I sometimes take sets of images to make a panorama. The final step is to stitch together these multiple images to make single, panoramic views, I now use Microsoft Image Composite Editor to do this, it preserves the EXIF data of the input image and does a nice auto-crop. My geotagging program flags up images that were taken close together in time as prospective panoramic images. The image below is a simple to image panoramic view (from Hinterglemm)

I mentioned video in the title: at the moment I’m still a little bemused by video. I use the same directory structure for storing videos as I do for pictures but I haven’t found album software I’m happy with or a reliable way of labelling footage – Picasa seems promising although the playback quality is a bit poor. ffmpeg looks like a handy programming tool. Any suggestions welcome!

Book Review: For all the tea in China

I’ve been on a bit of a reading spree: next up is “For all the tea in China” by Sarah Rose. This is the story of Robert Fortune and his trips to China in the mid-nineteenth century to obtain tea plants and the secret of tea manufacture for the East India Company to use in India.

Robert Fortune (1812-1880) was a botanist with a modest background. Starting his working life at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, he later became Curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden. These were relatively poorly paid posts, however there were few such positions to support a professional botanist without their own means of support. He made several substantial visits to the Far East, funded by the Horticultural Society of London and the British East India Company. He died a wealthy man in large part through the wide range of plant introductions he had made, as well as through sales of artefacts he had acquired in the Far East. The list of introductions is well worth a skim through for the modern gardener:

The East India Company had been given a monopoly of trade to the Far East in 1600, through this monopoly they had built a lucrative trade in silk and tea from China, as well as effectively running India. The trades from China were matched with trades into China of opium from India, by the middle of the 19th century addiction to opium was a significant problem in China. The volume of trade it brought made the East India Company a very significant contributor to British government income (of order 10%). Although there are now many global corporations, the East India Company was one of the first and in many ways most powerful. The company was ultimately to lose its dominance following the Indian Mutiny in 1858, and was finally wound up in 1874. The mutiny was likely the cumulation of a long process since the monopoly that the East India Company enjoyed was not popular with free-marketeers who were starting to come to the fore.

At the time of Fortune's first trip to China in 1845 the English had long been drinking tea imported from China, in exchange for opium grown in India. The English drank both green and black teas, although unlike the Chinese they added milk and sugar (obtained from another British colonial outpost). The Chinese were keen to keep the secret of both the tea plant, and its manufacture into tea leaves for making tea. Whilst the British, in particular the East India Company were keen to get these secrets believing (correctly) that tea would grow well in Himalayan India and would make a good profit. Some tea was already being grown in the Assam district of India but is was derived from inferior Chinese plants. The tea plant is Camellia sinensis a close relative of the decorative camellias of which Fortune also introduced some species.

Before Fortune's first visit to China it had not even been established that black tea and green tea came from the same plant, but were processed differently. His trips required considerable subterfuge: Westerners had only recently been allowed into anywhere other than a limited number of ports in China, as a result of the first Opium War and Fortune's activities went considerably beyond what was allowed even under these revised regulations. One of Fortune's discoveries was that green tea had been coloured by the Chinese for the export market using Prussian Blue (which is toxic) and gypsum. Following a couple of false starts he was eventually able to transport a large number of highest quality tea plant seedlings to Darjeeling in India, as well as providing skilled tea makers and extensive notes on the tea making process.

The key to Fortune's success in shipping out tea plants from China were Wardian cases, these are essentially sealed glass environments containing soil and some water. Plants, or more importantly, troublesome seeds could be sealed into these containers and as long as they remained sealed, and given some light there would be a good chance of their biological cargo surviving a lengthy sea journey through a range of climates. Prior to this discovery long distance transplantations were tricky. Nowadays we see Kew Gardens as largely a place of leisure, but in the 19th century it was very much at the heart of the Empire in terms of facilitating the movement of plants around the world for commercial reasons. This type of activity was also an early interest of the Royal Society.

It's difficult not to draw parallels between the state sanctioned opium trade which the United Kingdom used to support, and its current attitude to drug smuggling. Nor between the industrial espionage of the East India Company in the 19th century, and the current issues with the Chinese approach to intellectual property.

I found the sections of the book reporting Fortune's travels a bit unfulfilling: they seemed to be a sequence of travel anecdotes involving the mischief caused by his Chinese servants - this style does affect other parts of the books. However, more generally the book made me curious to know more about the East India Company, the Opium Wars and so forth and I felt I'd learnt something about the introduction of tea to India.

I'm tempted by Fortune's book: Three years' wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China 

Book review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This post can be read in full here: http://www.ianhopkinson.org.uk/2011/02/book-review-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks/

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is an unusual book. It is part cell biology: the story of cell-lines kept alive perpetually in the laboratory; it is part story of Henrietta Lacks and her family from whom the first of these cell-lines (called HeLa) was derived; it is the story of how medical ethics has evolved over the last 60 years and it is part story of the story.
Henrietta Lacks’ cells were taken at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1951 and cultured by George Gey during her treatment for an aggressive cervical cancer from which she subsequently died at the age of thirty-one, later that year. Gey, with the help of Lacks’ cells, was the first person to successfully maintain a cell-line. The cells cultured are cancer cells rather than normal cells. Following his work a wide range of other cell-lines were cultured from a variety of organs and species, however it subsequently turned out that many of these were actually the HeLa cell-line which turned out to be particularly pernicious. Researchers would start with a culture of different cells, but they would die to be replaced by HeLa cell “contaminants”.
Once Gey had started the cell-line he gave them away freely to other researchers, however it was not very long before the HeLa cells were being sold commercially. An early application of the HeLa cell-line was in testing the newly developed Salk vaccine for polio, the first of many, many applications. More dubiously Chester Southam injected the cancerous cells into prisoners, and subsequently into many patients. This was with the view to seeing if they developed within the body, the problem was that the patients were not informed that the cells were cancerous. This practice ended when three young Jewish doctors aware of the Nuremburg Code, proposed as a result of post-war trials of Nazi doctors responsible for horrific human experimentation, refused to take part in the experiments.
To my mind the unique part of the book is the in depth coverage of Henrietta Lacks’ family through to the present day. Rebecca Skloot tells in detail the long persistent trail to talk to them, an African-American family who certainly have good reason to be suspicious of white people asking about Henrietta. The Lacks’ were never a model family but then there is no reason for them so to be. Race and medicine have a poor history in the US. The Tuskagee Syphilis experiments perhaps being the lowest point, in which African-Americans were denied effective treatment for the disease so the full course of its symptoms could be observed. Other racism is less direct, as relatively poor Americans the Lacks family have reduced access to the treatments arising from the cells of their ancestor. If she were a white child, Elsie Lacks, Henrietta’s mentally disabled daughter would not have died at the Crownsville State Hospital, certainly not in such terrible circumstances.
In 2011 the cell lines derived from Henrietta Lacks would not have been called HeLa. Possibly her cells would not have been collected at all, requiring full informed consent. Her name would have become known to all including the family. The family would not have learned of the gruesome details of her death at the “hands” of an aggressive cervical cancer via a book whose author had been given Henrietta Lacks medical records.
To my mind the real shortcomings of the scientists were not in what they did in the first instance but how they failed to support the Lacks’ not with money but with information. Until Skloot and Christoph Lengauer showed them and spoke to them, no-one had explained exactly what cells had been taken, what had been done with them, the significance of Henrietta Lacks to science or the specific knowledge of her condition did or did not have to their health in terms which they could understand; giving them a book on cell biology was not enough. 
Skloot relates three stories of discoveries arising from a specific persons’ cells: the Lacks story and those of Ted Slavin and John Moore. Slavin was born a haemophiliac and as a result of the blood transfusions that he had to receive as a result of his condition he contracted Hepatitis B, however he did not succumb to this disease, he was immune. His doctor told him that this made him special, and that his blood was valuable and he subsequently profited from this knowledge by selling samples of his blood. John Moore, on the other hand, had hairy-cell leukemia and only discovered his blood was valuable after his doctor had patented his cell-line, he was subsequently involved in lengthy legal action to regain some control of his cells.
As a scientist whose work once touched, peripherally on human tissue culture and who recently had surgery from which such tissue was taken this is a somewhat uncomfortable story. In the project I worked on a postdoc was tasked with organising consent forms for, I think, blood vessels removed during a procedure i.e. they were a by-product. In this instance the specifics of the cells were not important – they were destined for frequently unsuccessful experiments. From our point of view the best possible outcome would been that the materials we had synthesised proved to be a congenial home for blood vessel wall cells. In this case nothing of monetary value is derived directly from the donors cells.
For my own part: I have no problem with researchers using my medical offcuts, I do feel unhappy with the idea that my specific cells might be valuable and that I might not get a proportion of that value.

Hinterglemm

A view up the Saalbach-Hinterglemm valley, Hinterglemm is in the distance

Mrs SomeBeans and I have been skiing again, staying in Hinterglemm in the SkiCircus area of Austria. Hinterglemm is the upper of the two main villages in a valley running east-west, Saalbach is the larger village and gets more sun but the lifts are spread out around the village. We went with Inghams, flying from Manchester to Salzburg, the transfer time is about 2 hours, with a stops at Zell am See and Saalbach which are both relatively close. Salzburg airport can’t really cope with the number of package tour flights it gets in a short period.

Conditions last week were fantastic, for the first four days of our holiday we didn’t see a single cloud, temperatures were fairly low but there was no new snow during the week. Skiing was best between about 8:30am-10am before most people, other than the locals, had got out on the slopes. I suspect getting up at 7:30 every morning is not most people’s idea of a holiday.

Hinterglemm has a lot of lift capacity out of the village, a short gondola ride takes you to a set of four chairlifts on the south-facing side of the valley and two longer gondolas take you to summits on the north facing side of the valley. The link to Saalbach on the south side of the valley is a bit odd: from Saalbach it an an old 3-seater chair lift, followed by a long t-bar drag lift and an old 2-seater chair lift. The return from Hinterglemm the link is a bit easier but still involves a short t-bar. A nice range of skiing with some big wide pistes, pistes through trees and a few long black runs on the north-facing side of the valley which we didn’t try out. The area is pretty well linked up with some circular routes, and the ability to get to pretty much anywhere in the linked are in a couple of hours at most.

We stayed at the Hotel Glemmtalerhof in a large north-facing room looking towards the Reiterkogelbahn which could have accommodated 5 people. The hotel is right in the middle of the village with only a short (~200m) walk to either the Reiterkogelbahn taking you onto the south-facing slopes or the Unterschwarzachbahn taking you to the north-facing slopes. Food was fabulous and overall a good hotel. Drawbacks were that is was a bit noisy, since it sat on the middle of the village and there seemed to be an awful lot of smoking being done in the reception, cafe and bar area. Across the valley, right next to the Reiterkogelbahn, was the Hotel Alpine Palace Wolf which looked very posh and maybe worth a go in future.

Some of the other guests were a little odd: Sunday night as Gala dinner night featured a dessert buffet, which they ate from copiously pretty much all the way through the meal. Mrs SomeBeans, qualified to teach food hygiene, observed sufficient prodding and sniffing of the desserts that she preferred not to partake.

Once again we were plagued by “other people”. This time the party who didn’t realise that “Boarding at gate 7” meant: “get on the plane”, and one of whose children spent the flight gently pummelling my back through the seat back – I was calm since I decided to treat it as a free massage!

Overall a very good holiday with some fabulous skiing: this trip was unusual in that we were able to travel in term time – normally we are restricted to school holidays. I suspect the lift system in SkiCircus copes fairly well with February half-term, so might give it a go then next year.

A selection of photos:

This is "twinkly snow", as you ski past it the ice crystals twinkle.

Mrs SomeBeans and I on a chairlift, we're a bit camera shy

Great snowfields near the top of a mountain

The Leoganger Steinberge, a panoramic view from Wildenkarkogel

Looking towards Hinterglemm,invisible over the edge, with pretty clouds and icicles

Obviously I captured GPS data, we covered about 180 miles in 7 days including uplift

More photos here, along with captions.

Book review: Lives of the Engineers

Reading the biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel got me interested in engineers; Rolt, the author of the Brunel biography, mentioned the biographical writings of Samuel Smiles: in particular his “Lives of the Engineers”. This post is about one part of the full work: ”The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson” this edition was published in 1879 although the original was written in the years following George Stephenson’s death, around 1860. The title describes its contents. George Stephenson, although not the inventor of the first locomotive, was instrumental in making it a workable proposition and his son (Robert) continued in his fathers line of work, although died quite young.

George Stephenson (1781-1848) was born and grew up around Newcastle-upon Tyne, at the time the area was riddled with coal workings. His father was employed as a fireman working on the pumping engine at Wylam colliery.

George is described as an inquisitive child very interested in nature, and constructing models of the machines he saw around him. He started working with the engines at the colliery as a child progressing to ever more responsible jobs at a range of collieries. Alongside this he did various bits of other work, such as shoe-last making and clock and watch repairs to bring more money in; paying to be taught to read and do arithmetic as he entered his late teens. I can’t help making a parallel with Joseph Banks who benefited from a more prosperous upbringing. It’s worth noting here that Samuel Smiles also wrote a book called “Self-help”, it’s clear he’s very much taken with George Stephenson as a self-made man, he is also very much taken with the entirely private nature of the enterprises he undertook.

Steam engines had been used to pump water out of mineworkings since around 1710 with the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen. These were large, inefficient engines. The first attempts at making a traveling engine seemed to take place around 1769 by Cugnot in France with the first practical moving steam engines due to Richard Trevithick around the turn of the century (1800). In the meantime various miner owners were experimenting with modified roadways to ease the movement of large amounts of heavy stuff (ores, coal) from mine-head to waterway for onward transport. This started with the laying down of wooden roads, followed by metal plates (1738) and finally rails (1776). It’s intriguing to see how the coalescence of these elements around mineworkings led naturally to the invention of the locomotive. For the early railroads, such as the Manchester-Liverpool there was a very real question as to whether locomotives or horses should be used as moving force.

The Manchester-Liverpool line really is key here: it was built out of desperate need for better commercial communication between Liverpool (port) and Manchester (manufacturing centre). In common with many lines there was enormous opposition on the ground from landowners and canal owners. It is also here that the modern locomotive comes into being in the form of the “Rocket”, reliability and commercial viability being absolutely key. In common with Brunel, Stephenson also faced parliamentary committees scrutinising the appropriate railway bill. In early discussions Stephenson argued that the locomotives would not exceed a speed of 12 miles an hour, so as not to scare the parliamentarians. Early railway lines were built with goods in mind, but turned out to be immensely, surprisingly popular for the carrying of passengers. The alternative being slower, less comfortable horse-drawn carriages of much lower capacity. George Stephenson was also responsible for at least some of the initial surveying of routes.

The rate at which the rail network came into being is truly astounding. The Manchester–Liverpool was opened in late 1830 by 1843 there were lines linking London to Birmingham, Southampton, Bristol, Brighton and Dover. There were also lines from Liverpool to Manchester and Leeds and onwards to York and Middlesborough, there was also a line between Newcastle and Carlisle. Follow this there was a wild burst of speculative activity, with several hundred proposals to parliament for new lines in 1845 (maps here).

Also covered in this book is Robert Stephenson (1803-1859), George Stephenson’s son. George gave Robert the education that he wished for himself. Although Robert started his engineering career working in the Stephensons’ locomotive workshop, set up in Newcastle, prior to the building of the Manchester-Liverpool he went on to be involved in the surveying and planning of new railway lines. Most notably bridges such as the Britannia Bridge across the Menai Straits, the Victoria Bridge across the Lawrence Seaway and the High Level Bridge in Newcastle. These first two were both originally “tube” design but were modified in the case of the Victoria bridge to a trestle design and the Britannia bridge was destroyed by fire in 1970. The building of the railways necessitated a huge expansion in bridge building: big, strong, well-built bridges.

Overall an enjoyable read although I suspect Samuel Smiles does not comply with modern historical best practice, with his enthusiasm for self-help, and anecdotes shining through in a number of places. Nevertheless, I feel motivated to read some more of his biographical work of the engineers of the 18th and 19th century.

References

Full text of a number of Samuel Smiles books available here.

Deficit reduction through growth

This blog post seeks to answer the question: what economic growth rate does the UK need to sustain in order to reduce the deficit to zero?

This seems like a relevant question at the moment, and I’ve not seen a straightforward calculation of the answer – so I thought I’d give it a go myself. The idea being that even if the end result is not particularly informative the thinking behind getting the end result is useful.

The key parameter of interest here is the gross domestic product (GDP): the amount of goods and services produced in a year in the UK; it’s a measure of how wealthy we are as a nation, how it increases with time is a measure of economic growth. Also important are the deficit (how much the government’s annual spending exceeds its income) and debt (how much the government is borrowing).

Inflation means that the GDP can appear to grow each year with no increase in real economic activity, therefore I decided to use “inflation adjusted” GDP figures. I also preferred to use annual GDP figures rather than quarterly ones.

To model this I took a starting point of a known GDP, debt, deficit and government spend which I then propagated forwards in time: I made the GDP grow by a fixed percentage each year, and assumed that government spending would be flat (I’m using GDP adjusted for inflation so I think this is reasonable). Assuming that the total tax take is a fixed proportion of GDP I can calculate the deficit and hence increasing debt in each year, I add the debt servicing cost to the government spending in each. Since I’m doing everything else in the absence of inflation I’ve used a debt servicing rate of 2% rather than the 5% implied by a £43bn debt interest cost in 2010 – this makes my numbers a bit inconsistent.

I’ve put the calculation in a spreadsheet here.

Given this model my estimate is that the UK would need to sustain GDP growth of 4.8% per year until 2020 in order to reduce the deficit to 0%. This 4.8% GDP growth brings in approximately an additional £30bn in taxes for each year for which the growth is 4.8%. During this time the debt would rise to nearly 80% of GDP and so the cost of servicing the debt will double. These numbers seem plausible and fit with other numbers I’ve heard knocking around.

To get a feel for how GDP has varied in the past, this is the data for inflation adjusted annual GDP growth in the UK since 1950:

The red line shows the “target” 4.8% GDP growth, and the blue bars the actual growth in the economic, adjusted for inflation. The data comes from here. What’s notable is that GDP growth has rarely hit our target and what’s worse, over the last 40 years there have been four recessions (where GDP growth is negative), so the likelihood must be that another recession before or around 2020 is to be expected.

In real-life we are actually using a combination of GDP, government spending cuts and tax increases to bring down the deficit. These calculations indicate 0.5% GDP growth is approximately £7bn per year which is equivalent to a couple of pence on basic rate (see here) or about 1% of government spending (see here).

Doing this calculation is revealing because it highlights why there is an emphasis on cuts in government spending as a means of reducing the deficit. This had been a bit of a mystery to me with the figure of 80:20 cuts to taxes ratio being widely quoted as some sort of optimum, although there is some indication of other countries working with a ratio closer to 50:50. The thing is that when you cut your spending, you are in control. You can set a target for reduction and have a fair degree of confidence you can hit that target and show you have hit that target relatively quickly and easily. On the contrary relying on growth in GDP, or taxes, is a rather more unpredictable exercise: taxes because the amount of tax raised depends on the GDP.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) published uncertainty bounds for it’s future predictions of GDP in their pre-budget report last year (see p10 and Annex A in this report), their central forecast is for growth of 2.5% but by 2014 (i.e. in only 4 years) they estimated only a 30% chance that it lay between 1.5% and 3.5% actually they only claim a 40% chance of being in that range for this year (2011).

At the risk of being nearly topical, GDP is reported to have shrunk by 0.5% in the last quarter of last year, 2010. This is largely irrelevant to this post, although forecasts for GDP were growth of ~0.5% which supports the idea that GDP is not readily predictable. It’s worth noting that the ONS will revise this figure at monthly intervals until they get all the data in – the current estimate is based on 40% of the data being available.

Given this abysmal ability to predict GDP I suspect that there is little governments can do to influence the growth in GDP. It would be interesting to estimate the influence government policy has relative to prevailing global economic conditions, and what timelags there might be between policy changes and growth.

I think these calculations are illustrative rather than definitive, and what I’d really like is for someone to point to some better calculations!

Which country is the UK like economically?

This blog post attempts to answer the economic question: What country is the United Kingdom like economically?

The question arises from discussions of deficit (how much the government’s annual spending exceeds its income) and debt (how much the government is borrowing). To use a digging analogy: debt is a hole, deficit is how fast you are deepening the hole. We can get a feel for how countries compare in this sense by plotting them as a function of their deficits and debts on a graph. I’ve done this for the countries of the OECD (data here). The horizontal axis tells you  the deficit, whilst the vertical axis is the debt. These values are plotted as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) so we can compare big countries and small countries, rich countries and poor countries on an equal footing.

As we go to the top left area of this graph we find countries which are in the deepest hole, digging fastest. Out of the extreme left we find the UK – it is digging its hole fastest at the moment, but it is not in the biggest hole – that honour currently goes to Japan. On this graph our nearest neighbours are Ireland, the United States and Iceland, with Greece and Japan having higher debt but lower deficit. France and Spain have similar debts but rather lower deficits.

Norway is actually bringing in more money than it spends and building a surplus, they have large oil revenues and are saving against the day when it runs out. Korea is doing this too but to a far smaller extent.

Economically it is often said that the PIGS or PIIGS countries are in most trouble in Europe, these are Portugal, Ireland, (Italy), Greece and Spain.

But is it true to say we are like Ireland, the US and Iceland? Ireland and Greece have much higher levels of unemployment than us, whilst the US has slightly higher levels and Iceland’s levels are comparable. Iceland has very high inflation (12%) whilst most other countries have moderate inflation including the UK, with a few countries having moderate deflation including the US and Ireland. We have moderate levels of unemployment, with Ireland, Greece, the US having much higher levels. It’s also worth pointing out that the UK has a population of 60,000,000 whilst Ireland only has 4,000,000 and Iceland a mere 300,000.

So whilst in deficit/debt terms we may resemble other countries in other, economically relevant ways, we are quite different.

From a mathematical point of view there are methods for measuring the closeness of things based on large numbers of variables, called clustering algorithms. These algorithms amount to our eyeballing of the debt/deficit data – they are a measure of distance. However, in economic problems things aren’t so simple. The economy is described by many variables and I don’t know their relative importance in determining economic similarity. The problem that the numbers involved may vary tremendously in size is trivially solved. My suspicion is that economists have probably spent a great deal of time arguing about economic similarity and haven’t come to a definitive answer.

So in answer to the question: What country is the United Kingdom like economically? Although the UK may be most like Ireland, the US and Iceland in debt/deficit terms. In terms of many other economic factors such as inflation, unemployment and so forth it is quite different. I suspect the real answer to this question is that the UK is most like France, Germany and Italy economically: these countries are of similar size, have similar unemployment rates, have inflation of the same sign, usually run public sector/ private sector ratios of similar size furthermore given their common membership of the EU their economic behaviour is probably similar. Of this group of countries Italy has the largest debt and we have a largest deficit.

Book Review: The Third Man by Peter Mandelson

A little bit of politics for this book review: “The Third Man: Life at the heart of New Labour” by Peter Mandelson. It’s been a while since I’ve read much politics; I did go through a spell of reading various diaries and biographies (Alan Clark, Tony Benn, John Major, Churchill) a number of years ago but gave up largely because the diarists and autobiographies seemed unwilling to accept they were wrong on anything, and I had a nasty experience with the biography of Gladstone.

I’m sort of fond of Peter Mandelson, I never really bought the Prince of the Dark Arts thing and he seems to be one of the more coalition minded senior Labour figures.

The book covers briefly Mandelson’s early life but the main focus of the book is the personal relationship between Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown from the late eighties all the way through to the 2010 election. Peripherally it is also the story of New Labour: firstly, a switch to a more professional presentational style, followed by the scrapping of Clause IV then it seems to go a bit vague in terms of a guiding policy theme. Mandelson states the central vision of New Labour being of fairness and social justice: but these are ideals I’m sure the Liberal Democrats would cleave to and the Tories would claim the same. Ultimately ideology is not helpful in discriminating between parties rather implementation of policy and no-one is really grasping the nettle of going for excellent implementation.

I’d always assumed that poor press for Labour ministers was as a result of biased media and some mysterious influence from the Tories that I hadn’t entirely thought through. Mandelson makes it pretty clear that the worst press for Labour came from Labour ministers and their hangers-on briefing against each other!

The central theme of the book was how awful the relationship between Brown and Blair was, lasting for many years and seriously hampering a New Labour programme for reform. The origin of this poor relationship is in the leadership struggle which took place following the death of John Smith in 1994. Communication between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor was poor, and they often seemed to be working largely to block each other. This makes hard reading, it’s like the story of a couple trapped in a loveless marriage “for the sake of the kids”. In some ways I find this disturbing: New Labour effectively provided it’s own opposition whilst in government in the sense that it limited their ability to make policy and enforce change on public services. What happens when the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are working to the same agenda?

Clearly as a Liberal Democrat I’m interested in what he has to say about us, the truth is: not much. There seems to be a degree to which Mandelson and Blair held key early members such as Roy Jenkins in high regard, seeing them as something of a lost tribe who had left the Labour party in the early eighties believing it to be un-reformable. He also describes the talk toward involving the Liberal Democrats in government following the 1997 election, eventually floundering because ultimately there was no need to give anything to the Liberal Democrats. It does seem that there was some quiet local arrangements where Labour or Liberal Democrats agreed not to fight too hard against each other at general elections. I suspect things have changed in both parties now, Liberal Democrats and Labour members of my generation and younger joined well after the split so for us the “progressive alliance” is something of an old man’s tale.

What also comes through for me is how grateful Labour should be for our electoral system, in the 1983 election when Labour polled 27.6% and the SDP-Alliance polled 25.4% they still gained 209 seats as opposed to the meagre 23 that the SDP-Alliance achieved. Similarly at the 2010 election, the Conservatives lead Labour by 7.1% in votes but only 48 seats whilst in 2005 Labour led Tory by just 2.8% but gained a 157 seat lead over the Conservatives giving them a firm majority.

Mandelson’s description of the Coalition negotiations following the May 2010 General Election are consistent with the Laws and Wilson books which I reviewed previously. Labour had not made any pre-election plans for coalition, which I still find odd since Peter Mandelson clearly saw the possibility of a hung parliament; the Labour party was split on whether they should make the attempt and ultimately there was a recognition that the parliamentary arithmetic did not add up.

It’s clear that the current theme of “no cuts” from Labour is a continuation of the Brown policy pre-election, Alastair Darling appears to have made considerable efforts to reach a budget which made at least some effort to start addressing the deficit in the final days of the previous government, in the teeth of enormous opposition from Gordon Brown whilst other members of the team such as Ed Balls were keen to make further spending commitments. Brown’s great fear seemed to have been being labelled a “tax-and-spend” Chancellor, who seems to have ended up a “spend” Chancellor and in the long term that does not add up.

Is this a good book to read? It is if you want to know about the personal relationship at the core of the book, and if want to know more about Peter Mandelson. I’m tempted to read Andrew Rawnsley’s “The End of the Party” for a more detached view.