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Are introverts on the autistic spectrum?

I haven’t blogged on psychology so far – it’s not a subject I know much about, academically at least. But this blog by Sophia Dembling in Psychology Today (thanks to Nic Prigg @nicola_prigg on Twitter) has really set me thinking.

Ms Dembling highlights a recent suggestion by a young research, Jennifer Grimes on introversion. Instead of thinking about it as part of a spectrum with introversion at one end and extroversion at the other, might these not be entirely separate characteristics? Instead try thinking about introversion on an autistic spectrum – with autism at one end, introversion at the other, and Asperger’s syndrome somewhere in between. That’s not to suggest that introversion is a disability, as autism can be, but as a more helpful way of thinking about both it and autism. It also opens the door to thinking about people who are both extroverted and introverted at the same time.

This carries me way of my depth. I am familiar with autism in theory, but I don’t now any people with more than mild personality characteristics that I would describe in that way. But I do know what it’s like to be an introvert – as I am a rather extreme version myself. This comes out of the various psychometric tests I have taken, as well as a life time of personal observation. I am very shy, introspective and do like to spend periods of time alone to collect myself. I also spend a lot less time than most grooming social and family contacts – which means that I have a smaller close social circle than most.

But I can do empathy – and rather well. In the organisations I have worked with I often take up the role of reconciler and peacemaker, seeing both sides to a dispute. I usually read between the lines quite well, leading to an ironical sense of humour. My friendships are stable and long-lasting, and only wither if I don’t devote enough time to them (which unfortunately happens quite a lot). I can do politics – rather well when I put effort into it. This is all somewhat opposite to how I’ve understood autism. I would say the same for other introverts I know too.

So my first reaction is to think Ms Grimes is barking up the wrong tree. But then perhaps that’s what she means by a spectrum – I’m not autistic, but share characteristics with those that are. It has certainly set me thinking. Perhaps a lot of my empathising skills are learned rather than innate? It would explain flashes of extrovert behaviour when my inhibitions are overcome (very rare). And I do sometimes miss things in social situations too. Which is no doubt what the what a lot of this is about – trying to think of old problems in new ways.

The other thing that strikes from this article is how difficult psychology is as an academic discipline. You are chasing shadows the whole time. We can’t physically see what is going on in our minds, and be sure what is generating the same symptoms in different people has the same cause. There is little that objective analysis can grasp on. But we know the subject is important – a better understanding of the mind is critical to the well-being of us as individuals, and of society as a whole.

Time to wake up to the de-industrialisation of advanced economies

Trying to understand the global economic crisis? This article from Joe Stiglitz is required reading.

I have flagged it already on Facebook and Twitter, but without much in the way of reflection. In fact it has produced an epiphany moment for me. I have maligned Professor Stiglitz in a past blog as producing only superficial commentary on the crisis, alongside his fellow Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. This was based on one or two shorter articles in the FT and some snatches on the radio; I wasn’t reading or listening carefully enough. Professor Stiglitz is one of the foremost economists on the current scene. He used to be part of the Clinton administration, and worked at the World Bank in the 1990s, but his views proved politically unacceptable. He also wrote the standard text book on public economics, which I used in my not so recent degree course.

The article is wonderful on many levels, but the epiphany moment for me came with his observation that, underlying the current crisis, is a long-term decline of manufacturing employment in the US, and by implication, other advanced economies too. He draws an interesting parallel with the Great Depression, which was caused, he claims, by a comparable shift from agricultural employment – again in the US; I think that such a shift was less marked in Britain, but the depression was also less severe. This decline in employment brought about a doom-loop of declining demand across the economy as a whole – which was only reversed by World War 2. The war effort caused a boom in manufacturing industry which was readily redeployed into the postwar economy. This view of the Great Depression rises above the fierce controversies over fiscal and monetary policy, and places them in a proper context.

We have been witnessing the decline in manufacturing employment for some years, and grappling with its social consequences. The important point is that it is mainly irreversible. It has been brought about by technological change, which has improved productivity. There is a limit to the number of manufacturing products that we can consume – just as there is a limit to the food we can consume, and we are at that limit. So the number of jobs declines.

Of course the picture is complicated by the rise of manufacturing in the developing world, and especially China, and their exports to the developed world. In the US I am sure, and certainly in the UK, more manufacturing output is now imported than exported, causing a further loss of jobs. This is reversible, though, and in due course will reverse, as the developing world advances and loses its temporary competitive edge. But this won’t be enough to reverse the overall trend of rising productivity.

But advancing productivity should be good news in the long run. It releases the workforce to do other things, or, if people prefer, to increase leisure time. So what replaces the manufacturing jobs, in the way that manufacturing took over from agriculture? Services, of course. What is, or should be, the product of these services? Improved wellbeing.

Services have rather a poor reputation in our society. Traditionalists see them as ephemeral, compared to the real business of making things – a bit like Soviet planners were obsessed with producing steel rather than consumer goods. More thoughtful people associate them with poor quality jobs in fast food restaurants or call centres. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We need to develop clearer ideas of what tomorrow’s service-based economy will look like. That’s important because the way out of the current crisis is through investments that will take us closer to this goal, just as war led to investment in manufacturing in the 1940s (and earlier in Europe).

And the key to this is thinking about wellbeing. This is important because one of the answers could be an increase in leisure, hobbies and voluntary activities – which is not normally regarded as economic activity at all. Reflecting on this, I think are two areas whose significance will grow and where investment should be made, both of which raise awkward political problems – health and housing.

It is easy to understand that health and social care will take up a higher proportion of a future economy than they do now, and not just because of demographic changes. These services are vital to wellbeing. But we are repeatedly told that we can’t afford to expand them. And that is because we are reaching the limits of what state-supplied, taxpayer funded services can deliver in the UK. (In the US it’s another story for another day). The health economy of tomorrow will have a larger private sector component, whether integrated with the NHS or parallel to it. But what should our priorities now be, while this private sector is on the back foot? It seems sensible to make the NHS more efficient and effective, but foolish to cut jobs. We should be building the skill base alongside the reform programme. The chief critics of the government’s NHS plans (including the Labour front bench) are that NHS reforms should be stopped so that they can focus on the critical business of raising efficiency. But maybe it should be the other way round – we should be pushing ahead with reform, but relaxing the efficiency targets and letting the costs rise a bit until the economy starts showing greater signs of life. then, as any cuts are made the private health sector can take up the slack.

Perhaps housing is pushing at the boundaries of what “services” are. We traditionally view this as a capital investment. But what I mean is providing more and better places for people to live in, whether they own them or not. Most of the country is quite well off here, but poor housing is probably what divides rich from poor more than anything else – and more investment in the right places (decently sized social housing) could rebalance things nicely and dramatically improve wellbeing.

But beyond this we badly need to get out of a manufacturing mindset, both in the private and public sectors. We should not view division of labour and specialisation as the ideal form of organisation (massive call centres, and so on), and we should value listening skills much more – I nearly wrote “communication skills” but most people understand this about getting over what you want to say, not understanding what your customer or service user actually needs. This is happening only very slowly.

So I would add a third priority: education. We need to greatly expand the teaching of life skills at school and elsewhere. This would not only help build the skills that tomorrow’s economy needs. It would help people make better choices in a changing world.

Capitalism, crony capitalism and neoliberalism. What’s in a word?

Are the Occupy protesters on to something? Or is theirs just a hopeless battle against abstract nouns?

I have been rather exercised about some abstract nouns recently. First was the word “Neoliberalism” selected by Simon Titley of the Liberator as one of three Bad Ideas to have infected British politics over the last 30 years, sweeping along the Liberal Democrat leadership with the rest of the mainstream. The other ideas were the “Westminster Bubble” (the idea promoted by a lazy media that only ideas that have taken hold in Westminster matter), and that the Westminster elite have a monopoly of political wisdom (expressed by contempt both for grassroots activists). Neoliberalism had a starring role in the previous month’s Liberator when Mr Titley and David Boyle roped it into their narrative of what went wrong with British politics in their article “Really Facing the Future”. Mr Titley felt he had written enough already on the subject to explain what he meant by neoliberalism – unfortunately before I have been subscribing to Liberator.

Another tiresome abstract noun has been even more prominent: “Capitalism”. This has been the main target of Occupy. It was recently brought into further focus by Tory MP Jesse Norman in an FT article based on his pamphlet “The Case for Real Capitalism“. This pamphlet is not a particularly coherent or convincing piece of work, though to be fair he does say that a longer, and presumably better argued, version is in preparation. But by harnessing a couple of qualifiers (“crony” and “good”) he tries to make sense of capitalism, and brings neoliberalism into the picture too. It’s good place to start a probe into whether these words have any useful purpose.

In Mr Norman’s picture the world has been suffering from “crony capitalism”. He identifies various strands (e.g. “narco-capitalism”, taking it well beyond what I would call “crony” capitalism, which should really involve cronyism – business leaders being too close to political leaders. Still he does offer a workable definition of bad capitalism:

Crony capitalism is what happens when the constraints of law and markets and culture cease to be effective. Entrepreneurship and value creation are replaced by rent-seeking, and certain groups become enormously wealthy without taking risk. These factors in turn lead to long-term economic underperformance, and sometimes to social unrest.

Apart from the use of “crony” and the economics jargon of “economic rent” (which means profits accruing to a business over and above the opportunity costs of inputs) this is quite useful. Something that is recognisably capitalism – an economy based mainly on private enterprise – can look like this, and when it does, it is bad. But capitalism doesn’t have to be this way – hence Mr Norman’s employment of “good capitalism”. This version emphasises the need for free competition and the consistent application of the rule of law. But that by itself is not enough.

Mr Norman contrasts “good capitalism” with our friend “neoliberalism”, which does not have a moral dimension. Like Mr Titley, he does not bother to define neoliberalism. But from context I can identify it with what the FT writer and economist John Kay called “the American Business Model” in his 2002 book The Truth about Markets which was part of my Christmas reading. This elevates the simplifying assumptions of classical economics (rational behaviour, consistent and stable preferences, perfect competition, and so on) into a moral value system. In particular it idealises a ruthless focus on maximising personal gain in the framework of impartially enforced rules (property rights in particular). This way of thinking remains very popular in America, with the Chicago School giving it considerable intellectual heft. But it has never taken off in Europe, and Britain is very much part of Europe on this issue, as in so much else. The emphasis on personal gain – greed – and antipathy to social solidarity are too much for all but a lunatic fringe to accept. And that includes Conservatives like Mr Norman. Good capitalism has a moral dimension – and one that celebrates the virtues of hard work and social responsibility.

Meanwhile the use of “neoliberalism” on the British left (including Mr Titley) clearly does not conform to the definition that Mr Norman uses. Within its scope are swept Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the “Orange Book” Liberal Democrats such as Nick Clegg. But none of these are or were Chicago School types. Apart from Mrs Thatcher, maybe, all see a huge role for government in our society and would expand its remit. But they have criticised the way producer interests have captured public services, profoundly undermining its quality.

Another issue needs to be mentioned here: and that is financial explosion in the UK and US that occurred in the period 1997-2007, and which ended so badly in the current crisis. This is closely associated with greed in the public’s minds, of bankers mainly, but also chief executives and (whisper it) all those ordinary members of the public that racked up credit card and mortgage debt. This is swept into the general idea of “capitalism” and “neoliberalism”. And indeed neoliberal ideas were used to justify the behaviour of many of the more egregious participants. But true believers in neoliberalism have little difficulty in shrugging such criticism off. To them what caused the crisis was excessive government intervention (e.g. by encouraging subprime lending in the US) and the failure to uphold proper open markets (through the implicit government guarantee of banking activities, for example).

All of which renders the words “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” as useless abstract nouns. There is little consistency in their use between the different political factions; their use by one faction is misunderstood by the other in an endless cycle of talking at cross purposes. The Occupy movement seems particularly bad at this.

To make headway in the political debate we need to move on from the abstract to the practical. What is the best way of providing health and education services? What should the scope be of social insurance? How can we get private businesses to invest more in the future and distribute their profits (or economic rents if you prefer) more equitably?

Could the hacking scandal threaten David Cameron?

Am I being too sanguine? I asked this of myself a week ago after posting on the Euro crisis. Now I’m asking myslf the same thing over my recent posting on the hacking crisis. Could there be a lot more trouble than I was predicting for David Cameron and the Police?

Consider this article in Lib Dem Voice on Cameron. This develops the idea that there was a lot of railroading of the rules when the PM hired Andy Coulson as his Downing Street (i.e. Civil Service) press adviser. The pressure building up on this story could prove intolerable. Of course the public at large won’t take a great deal of interest in this, but it’s sort of thing that can obsess people in the Westminster bubble. And this bubble, to switch metaphors in midstream, is the pond in which Mr Cameron swims; he can’t survive if it becomes poisonous, even if the world outside is fine.

I also bought Private Eye for the first time in years this week. This is thick with innuendo about actual police bribery, using travellers’ cheques, which goes against my suggestion that this is quite rare in the modern force. And lots of innuendo about the closeness of the Murdoch empire to both the Police and government.

The problem is that I share a characteristic with Mr Cameron – my first reaction to trouble tends to be to play it down. This can be be very useful; it tends to calm people down, buy you time for a more considered view, and stop time-wasting. Too many people have the opposite tendency to panic at everything. But it can leave you flat-footed on those occasions when trouble is both real and unexpected. I remember being most senior person in our Moorgate office when the 7/7 bombs went off; for the first few hours I was behind the curve. To compensate what you need is to have some good advisers close to you who can challenge your assessment. Ironically this was one of the things that Mr Coulson did for Mr Cameron, and did very well, as far as I can make out. In fact it’s because he was so effective in the job he was employed for that Mr Cameron has difficulty in understanding that the fuss amounts to much. But if Mr Coulson used his privileged position to improperly advance the interests of the Murdoch empire, then there’s real trouble.

Still, I may have been right on the Euro crisis. The can has been kicked down the road again. There was a lot of relief after last week’s summit of the Euro leaders; no doubt as the detail comes to light people will be less reassured. In one sense it gets more and more difficult to kick the can each time – but it is equally clear that the Eurozone’s leaders have the political will to do the necessary. Gradually a new architecture for managing the Euro zone is emerging. It is one that condemns the UK to the sidelines, but that’s another story for another day.

What will the hacking scandal change?

I’m afraid I’ve been swept along by the drama of the hacking scandal, even as the Euro heads for meltdown, the US for financial suicide, and famine ravages the Horn of Africa. I watched the Murdochs before the Select Committee on Tuesday afternoon, and spend more time than I should reading online articles. The human drama is compelling, with a steady stream of people coming a cropper. But as I posted last week I am a lot less sure about longer term consequences for the press and politics in general.

There may be further damage to come for News Corporation. Rupert Murdoch at the hearing said that “this is the humblest day of my life”, and that was his clear intention – to halt the damage at that point. He was appropriately contrite and respectful. But he clearly equates his organisation with himself. He seemed puzzled with the suggestion that he might resign. He feels betrayed by people he trusted, and that’s it. The success of his damage limitation depends on what further comes out. Anything that gives the affair legs in the US could be toxic; he has plenty of enemies there. In the UK the worst is probably over; there will be prolonged skirmishing over who said what to whom, which will get insiders worked up, but not the public at large. People already suspect the worst, so the damage is already largely done. It would help him a lot if similar issues emerged at other newspapers. If everybody is to blame, nobody is. The Murdochs quite rightly steered clear making any suggestions that other organisations were just as bad, but it must be on their minds.

The Police, and especially the Met, are the next victims. But again I think the worst might be over. People suspect rampant police corruption, with journalists paying for information. I doubt whether much of this actually went on. I’m sure it used to, but it really is at odds with modern police culture. The police have provided lots of information to journalists, but not in exchange for bribes. The police were much too close to the press, as were Tory and Labour politicians, but it will be difficult to pin this down to what people euphemistically call “wrongdoing” – i.e. actual criminal offences as opposed to the merely unethical. One or two individuals may get caught out, but they are likely to be more junior than those already forced to resign.

Next in the firing line is David Cameron. Ed Milliband has decided that he is vulnerable, and has been banging away endlessly about his employment of Andy Coulson. His discussions with the Murdoch organisation over the BSkyB bid has opened up a new line of attack. This may have some way to run, but it doesn’t feel fatal. The whole Coulson affair has been pretty open; there are no fingerprints on the BSkyB issue, though Mr Cameron’s evasions are not doing him any good. There’s a good article from Steve Richards in the Independent on this. Some of the shine is coming off Mr Cameron, but to my mind this was always coming to him. His performance as PM has been less than assured, notwithstanding his Etonian self-confidence, and I have been amazed that it has taken this long for people to see through it. There’s no serious alternative to him in the Tory party, and talk of him having to resign is just typical of the silly chatter that can build up.

Mr Milliband, by contrast, has done quite well. Enough to keep his rivals at bay (and there are serious alternatives in the Labour Party), but not enough to allay wider doubts. There are some signs of a Lib Dem recovery – but not because any of their figures are playing a prominent role, despite efforts to boost Vince Cable for being the first to “declare war” on the Murdochs. In fact it was his foolish loose talk that deprived him of a serious role in the affair.

One change may be long lasting – and that is the influence of the tabloids. Tony Blair set the trend of very close relationships with them, not least by his employment of Alistair Campbell as his communications adviser. In his time Mr Campbell was lionised, as being the power behind the throne. He spent a lot of his energy setting up meetings with tabloid editors and, indeed, owners. Having set the trend, everybody else followed. Including the Metropolitan Police and Mr Cameron. As the light is being shone on this, it doesn’t look so clever. The cosy relationship has ceased. Steve Richards has again written very well on this.

The tabloids play a unique role in British politics, in delivering the sort of attack material that in the US is done by television advertising. I won’t forget the anti-Clegg frenzy unleashed by them in the last weeks of the 2010 General Election. It’s small wonder that politicians have sought access to this power. But tabloids are a declining market, with more and more people getting their news from the internet. Younger media owners, not excluding James Murdoch, are more interested in readership than in throwing their weight around to influence politics. This affair may mark a decisive episode in the decline of the tabloids’ role in politics.

The enduring legacy of paganism

Tennis stars Rafael Nadal or Andy Murray throw their (sweat-soaked) wrist-bands into the crowd after winning a match at Wimbledon. To me this is rather bizarre. What on earth would I do if one of them landed in my lap? But the Romans would have understood, and I would not be surprised if victorious gladiators did something quite similar. The latest exhibition at the British Museum looks at another variation of this behaviour, on a massive scale, that overtook Christianity for over 1,000 years, up to the Reformation in the 1500s. This was the collection of relics associated with saints (usually body parts) and with Jesus Christ (pieces of the cross, thorns from the crown of thorns, etc.).

This is the Treasures of Heaven exhibition. At one level it is a showcase for many wonderful artefacts of exquisite craftsmanship. But the exhibition also explains the practices of this aspect of medieval faith, and gives us an opportunity to reflect on it. There are three aspects in particular that are interesting. First is the obsession with relics – seeing, possessing, touching physical objects that have been associated with somebody holy, in the belief that some of the holiness will be passed on. Second, the importance of saints acting as intermediaries between the faithful and God after their death. Third, the dismemberment of saints’ bodies for use as relics.

The general idea of relics does have a strong resonance in our culture, which persist still – witness the tennis stars’ wrist bands, the obsession with original artworks over copies, and so on. The interest is in their use in this religious context, as that is much less common. It wasn’t part of the Jewish faith from which Christianity grew. This looks like a pagan inheritance from the Romans. An obsession with sacred places, to which pilgrimages are made, was also an important part of medieval devotion, but this is unremarkable by comparison; pretty much all faiths have something similar.

The practice of worshipping saints looks like an inheritance from pagan polytheism. The jump to monotheism from animism and polytheism is a huge one. In the Jewish faith this seems to have taken quite a long period of time; in the Far East it doesn’t seem to have happened at all, with polytheism evolving directly in atheistic faiths such as Buddhism. Worshipping saints looks like an intermediate step; a similar thing seems to be the case in Shia Islam.

The dismemberment of bodies really is strange though. According to the British Museum, this doesn’t seem to have pagan roots. There is a strong human instinct that bodies should be kept whole. Perhaps it started because so often martyrs’ bodies where dismembered in early Roman persecution.

Once the cult of relics got going, it is very difficult not to be cynical. Most of the relics were clearly forgeries. The practice suited clerical and secular authorities and was exploited by them. Eventually there was a backlash, started by Martin Luther and flowing on through the Reformation. Many relics were destroyed, including virtually all those in Britain. A number have ended up in museums, and so to this exhibition. The Catholic church persists with the practice, but somehow I think most of the power has gone. Saints are seen as examples, and sainthood a sort of posthumous honour – and not as active intermediaries. Relics might be seen as objects for meditation, and not much more.

Meanwhile in popular culture, we have reverted to the idea that dead bodies should be kept whole. A huge fuss was created when a hospital was found to have retained some children’s body parts for research. We expend a lot of effort trying to find bodies after a catastrophe, to act as a focus for memorial and “closure”. As people in Britain drift away from Christianity, they drift back into to a pagan, pre-Christian outlook. Sports and entertainment stars take up the role of deities; people collect and worship their possessions and even sweat; they conduct pilgrimages to their holy sites. But we don’t dismember their bodies after death.

The wonderful world of Scilly

I have recently returned from a holiday in the Isles of Scilly (note for pedants: “Scilly” for short, not “the Scillies”). I have been going there every two years or so for over 20 years, and it’s still one of my favourite places.

Some of the attractions are obvious. White, sandy beaches (though the water is still cold); beautiful rocks (pictured in the title to this blog); a kind climate, notably better than the mainland; the ever-fascinating and ever-present sea. But it is also a wonderful, miniature world apart. Everything is smaller: roads, cars, shops , castles. Each island has its own post office, even though in many cases the number of inhabitants is less than a single London street (well not quite true; the post office on Bryher, the smallest island has closd down – but a new one is being built to replace it!). It’s very English too; relations with the mainland may be a bit strained sometimes, but you hear nothing of Cornish nationalism.

This year our visit coincided with a daytrip by the Queen – and we did catch a glimpse of her. It was real shock to see so many policemen, though, including ones armed with machine guns. The islands are nearly crimeless. One of our guests accidentally dropped his wallet on the morning of his departure. A passing chambermaid from one of the local hotels, picked it up, took it to the receptionist, who managed to locate us before we even knew it was gone.

We’ll be going back.

Service break

I am on holiday for a couple of weeks, and won’t be attempting to post while away. I’ll be back later. Last week has been busy, so I’ve not posted much – but I’ve got lots of ideas…

The intellectual cowardice of Spiked

I really try to like the online magazine Spiked. They are liberals that challenge the paternalism of the bulk of those who think of themselves as liberal. They try to make common cause with the attitude ordinary people, outside the ruling and media elites. But then I read things like this:

Nuclear energy: clean, reliable and powerful. Physicist Wade Allison expertly demolishes fears about radiation. If only he was equally as sceptical about the fear-fuelled climate-change panic.

It links to a book review by deputy editor Rob Lyons. Spiked is trying to resist the scare stories around nuclear power and, separately, climate change. But its writers seem incapable of engaging in a sensible debate. They are happy to agree Wade Allison about the threat from radiation, but can’t engage with his arguments about climate change. Spiked’s writers form a view, cheer anybody that agrees with them, and boo anybody that disagrees. And this case cheer and boo both at once. No weighing of the arguments on either side is attempted.

I have a similar issue with their attitude to AV. Fair enough to challenge the public arguments made by the Yes camp, a lot which are quite shallow, and call for a better standard of debate. But they don’t bother much with the even weaker (and downright fraudulent) arguments made by the Nos. And the arguments they offer themselves are just as shallow as the arguments they reject. Apparently AV will make our politicians even more insipid. As I have argued elsewhere, because AV makes it easier to field spoiler candidates, there is good reason to think the opposite. They only have to look at the Australian experience to see.

Spiked simply doesn’t have the courage to take the higher ground when it is offered them. They won’t engage in real debate because they are too afraid that it will expose their prejudices. What a shame.

Poverty Over campaign: why Christian Aid is not serious about eradicating poverty

I am a regular donor to Christian Aid, with a history of support that goes right back to when I was a boy. It has outlasted my attachment to the Church itself because the charity does not go in for proselytising, and they are dealing with some pretty gritty and important issues. So I get their supporters’ magazine. The latest publicises their Poverty Over campaign (which in the publicity is written as POVERTY). The aim is to “deal with the root causes of poverty”; the publicity highlights eight issues: climate change, conflict, corruption, disasters, food and agriculture, health, inequality, and tax. All of these issues are closely related to poverty. But, like “Make Poverty History” before it, the title suggests that its aim is to end poverty, rather than to merely alleviate it. And here it has almost nothing to say. Perhaps because the answer is too uncomfortable for most of the charity’s supporters, and perhaps even its staff, to accept.

There has been rather a lot of progress in eradicating poverty in the last couple of centuries. According to the map that accompanies the article, in 1821 pretty much the whole world was in poverty (Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands were the exceptions according to this, though the inclusion of Ireland is surely a bit shaky). Now according to the map alongside it only a minority of countries are in poverty, across the central part of Africa, and a few Asian outliers like Afghanistan and Burma. That picture seems a bit too bright, but we need to acknowledge the progress made by countries such as South Korea and China in the last 40 or so years. It is worth asking how such rapid progress has been made.

We usually think of poverty in terms of low consumption – insufficient food, poor shelter, a few clothes and practically nothing else. It is more helpful to look at the other side of the coin: low production, or low productivity. Beating poverty is about boosting the productivity of countries that are poor. It’s not about dumping surplus production from the rich onto poor societies, the only other way it can theoretically be broken

And yet raising production involves wrenching change. And one change above all: moving people from the countryside to towns. In poor societies agriculture is ludicrously inefficient, and this drags the whole economy down. In towns it is much easier to mobilise people into more productive activities in manufacturing and services. What is more, it is much more efficient to deliver basic services such as education, health services, power and water to people living in towns. Pretty much every breakout from poverty, from our own in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, to China now, has invovled the emptying of the countryside and the growth of massive cities. Only when society is much more wealthy, and infrastructure much better, do we see some reversal. Now where’s that in Christian Aid’s eight issues?

The problem is that we in our comfortable developed societies don’t like the idea of imposing such drastic change on the poor. The change is painful. Families are torn apart; initially poverty at both ends (in the country and town) is extreme. Our attitudes to the country are tinged with a folk memory of a lost rural idyll. There’s another uncomfortable truth. Such changes sit uneasily with democracy. Some of the most successful changes have been carried out by benevolent dictatorships (consider China, the early days of South Korea, Singapore). The record of democracies may be better than that of kleptocratic dictatorships, but it is flawed. India has advanced phenomenally, but, compared to China, it has left huge swathes of the population behind in dire poverty without much hope of escape. Poverty Over implies turning a blind eye to progressive dictatorships.

So what should we be doing if we truly want to end poverty? Well the first point is that we can’t impose progress from outside. Ending poverty is painful, and not an automatic choice; things may have to get worse before they get better; this has to be led by the locals. We have to back off a bit. The second point is that most aid should focus on urban poverty. Rural poverty may be cuddlier and more instinctively appealing (remember the Christmas campaigns about buying people goats?) but it carries the risk of perpetuating poverty rather than ending it. Rural aid should concentrate on making it easier for people to migrate: so improving literacy and education is an obvious one. But even then you get more bang for your buck in the towns. Thirdly we should promote the role of competition and businesses in the developing world, if we can. Too often local elites leach off local businesses, or create excessive regulation as a source of soft jobs and bribes. That prevents more productive employment opportunities from being created. Fourthly, promote constructive multinationals. Multinationals inject a dose modern productivity and efficiency into countries, and helps raise levels of trade. They are perhaps the best way of channelling our excess wealth into the developing world. Of course there are badly behaved multinationals, complicit in corruption and taking more than they give – but when they work well they are a better, more sustainable channel of help than any other.

Urbanisation; helping businesses; supporting the right sort of multinationals. Apart from a tangential reference in dealing with corruption, none of this gets a look in in Poverty Over. Not even education does. Instead of ideas that would really help eradicate poverty, we get a ragbag of politically correct issues that suit the tastes of western do-gooders. Christian Aid is not beginning to tackle the root causes of poverty. Perhaps it shouldn’t try. Good knows that just alleviating its symptoms needs doing. That’s why I will continue to support them.