Marion Millar has been charged in Scotland with the crime of “malicious communication” due to tweets criticizing gender self-identification.

Modern economists attempt to define money by correlating it with economic activity. As Austrian economists know, money is defined by its function as a medium of exchange.

ONE OF THOSE WOMEN WHO DIDN’T EXIST IN SCIENCE FICTION UNTIL THE 2000s!  Happy Birthday, Leigh Brackett!

I support the jury system as I support democracy: it is the worst system of justice around, except for all the others. My own experience of serving on a jury was inspiring in some ways, frustrating in others. The current Labour government wants to abolish them for all but the most serious cases. Assuming Sir Keir Starmer and Mr David Lammy MP are sincere in their claim that all they want to do is speed up justice, are there any better ways to do that than denying the accused their ancient right to a jury of their peers?

David Friedman was recently summoned to present himself for jury service in the US. He seems to have been sent home without ever reaching the jury-box. I have the impression that the the American courts turn away a higher percentage of those called to jury service than the UK courts do, and also that they make much more of a fuss about excluding jurors who might be biased, which over there often seems to mean in effect excluding jurors who might be intelligent. Despite this and many other differences between the two systems, not all of which favour the UK, I think that Professor Friedman’s observations on the careless way in which jurors’ time was wasted might be relevant to us here. The underlying reason Friedman and his fellow jurors (or whatever the word is for people who are called to be jurors but are not chosen) got to know every crack in the courthouse wall was that the people who have power to speed up or slow down cases pay next to nothing for the jurors’ time. Friedman writes:

What most struck me, as an economist, about the process was the implication of its having access to nearly free labor — there was no payment for the first day, fifteen dollars a day thereafter. The courthouse was towards the south end of the county, about half an hour’s drive from me, forty-five minutes from the north end. We were told that the jurors were selected at random, with no attempt to select jurors for cases in the south courthouse from the south end of the county — because doing that would have biased the selection, how was not explained.

Out of more than eighty of us called in only about twenty-one were put through the voir dire process. The rest were presumably there in case more were eliminated, but it is hard to see how that could justify calling in that many. A jury system that took the value of our time seriously could have called in half as many, perhaps fewer, and, if that occasionally turned out not to be sufficient, additional candidates the next day. By the end of the first day they knew that they had most of the jurors they needed, could have saved most of the rest of us the time and the trip.

Further evidence is how our time in the courthouse was used. We arrived the first day by nine, were sent home at four, a total of seven hours on site. Of those seven hours we spent most of an hour waiting to be told what room we were to go to, an hour and a half for lunch, two hour long breaks. We were actually involved in the jury selection process for less than three hours out of seven.

That again looks like a result of treating our time as a free good, but I do not know enough about what else was happening to be certain. Running a trial, even the preliminaries to a trial, involves coordinating the activity of multiple people: juror candidates, the judge, the attorneys, perhaps others. My guess is that if the county had to pay a market rate for our time they would have found a schedule that used it more efficiently but I could be wrong.

I have so far interpreted what I observed as evidence that the people responsible did not care how much of our time was spent in the process, since our attendance was compulsory and the price paid for it low, on the first day zero, but there is another possible interpretation of the evidence.

Free Audience
Much of the time we were in the courthouse we were being preached to, largely about the virtues of the jury system, first in videos while we were waiting to be assigned to a jury room, later by the judge, who described the jury system as the essential support of a free society. He did not mention that, in the current US legal system, less than a tenth of felony defendants get a jury trial, with the rest of the convictions due to guilty pleas, mostly from plea bargains. A defendant who rejects the offered plea bargain and goes to trial risks a much higher penalty.

The judge and the videos repeatedly told us that, if we ended up on the jury, we were to decide the case on the basis only of information presented at trial, ignoring anything else, especially warning us against going online to get relevant information. That sounds reasonable but is in fact impossible. Each juror’s interpretation of witness testimony depends on his view of how truthful people are, how to tell when they are lying, how likely the events they describe are to have happened, an enormous body of information based on previous experience. There is no way to reach a verdict on the basis of nothing but trial evidence. As a Bayesian would put it, no posterior without a prior.

The judge and the videos repeatedly praised us for our contribution to the process, never mentioning that it was mandatory, that we did not have the option of refusing to come.

We were being told things the judge, the trial apparatus more generally, wanted us to believe, told them by authoritative sources at little risk of being contradicted. Not only was time we spent in the courthouse not a cost to those running the process it may have been, from their point of view, a benefit.

Friedman is undoubtedly right to say that “Running a trial, even the preliminaries to a trial, involves coordinating the activity of multiple people: juror candidates, the judge, the attorneys, perhaps others.” He goes on to speculate that “if the county had to pay a market rate for our time they would have found a schedule that used it more efficiently but I could be wrong.” I remember once travelling several hours by train to a company’s headquarters to discuss a commercial project. Sweet young thing that I was, I pointed out that if they held the meeting a quarter of an hour later I could buy some sort of saver ticket and save them more than a hundred pounds. They declined to do so. The nice man who spoke to me was at pains to say that this was not because he did not care about saving his employers money, it was because when you added up the cost of the time of all the attendees, the fuss and time involved in changing their schedules would probably cost more than my £100-plus. I believed him on that, even if I didn’t entirely believe that he was as careful with the company’s money as he would be with his own.

In the US jurors are paid very little. In the UK jurors are technically not paid at all, but can claim allowances to cover lost earnings – which works out OK for those with predictable salaries but badly for those with uncertain day-to-day income, especially if their business depends on them being available. If we paid jurors more but changed nothing else, juries would be even more of a burden on the taxpayer than they are currently. But is it crazy to think that if, somehow, those running the process were made to bear more of the costs of calling jurors then they would have an incentive to streamline things? We may not wish to make as much use of plea bargaining in the UK as the US does, but I know from long airless hours in the waiting room of a Crown Court building with a broken air conditioning system that those who operate the British justice system, which mostly means judges and defence and prosecution lawyers, like their American equivalents, do not directly pay for the time of jurors and therefore waste it in the manner that human beings commonly do waste that which someone else pays for. The “someone else” in this case being the insensate generic taxpayer. We in the UK do not even have the minimal incentive to save money that comes from “the county” footing the bill; here it is all paid for centrally by the Ministry of Justice. Rather than rip up the ancient jury system to save a few quid, could we not achieve the same object by, say, making more use of video calls? (Do we make more use of video calls since the pandemic, and I missed the memo?) Or if not the video calls, something else. This random blogger may not be able to think of ways to improve the system, but I bet people who work with it every day would be able to, given the incentive. History abounds with people who ceased to get a resource for free and suddenly discovered ingenious ways to use that resource more intelligently. The difference between this and what Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy want is the difference between wielding an axe and a scalpel.

If we paid jurors more we could trade the extra money for indulging them less in other ways. When did it stop being the case that jurors were denied light, fire and sustenance until a verdict was reached? CoPilot says 1670. ChatGPT says 1825. Roll on the Butlerian Jihad: I know for a fact that it was still true in 1930 when Harriet Vane stood trial for the murder of Philip Boyes. In that case, which took place before majority verdicts were allowed, the artist and that redoubtable spinster Miss Climpson held out for Not Guilty and forced a retrial. The artist alarmed the rest of jury by saying that he was accustomed to late nights and a stale atmosphere and had not the slightest objection to sitting up all night and Miss Climpson also said that in a righteous cause, a little personal discomfort was a trifle, and added that her religion had trained her to fasting.

Perhaps it would be going too far to bring back that rule in its full vigour. Those were the days when, as Alexander Pope put it in his satirical poem The Rape of the Lock, “Wretches hang that jurymen may dine”. The stiff-necked jury of which Edward Bushel was the foreman deserve their plaque in the Old Bailey and their place in British legal history. But maybe it would speed matters up if we, while paying jurors decently for their time and allowing them a reasonable level of comfort, stopped letting them go home at night. Making jury sequestration mandatory is another thing that I think might save more money than it costs in the long run. It would curb the abuse of the requirement for disclosure when, for instance, the defence electronically dumps a vast number of documents on the prosecution most of which are irrelevant but which the prosecution must read anyway, and feels obliged to pass on in only slightly reduced form to the jury. Come to think of it, it would reduce the use of disclosure, which was a reasonable safeguard against injustice being done when reproducing a document involved typewriters and carbon paper but has become an impediment to justice when a million words can be sent at the touch of a button. I see no reason to believe that fraud trials “being more complex nowadays” and hence taking months or years is an unalterable fact of nature. Were fraud trials inherently less complex – or less fair – a hundred years ago?

Readers learned in the law can probably think of many things wrong with the somewhat random set of proposals I came up with in this post. The wider point I want to make is that if Messrs Starmer and Lammy really seek only to speed up the legal system there are better ways than amputating one of the legs upon which it stands. Some of those ways could involve simply going back to doing things we know work because they did work.

The aforementioned case of R v Vane is also relevant to David Friedman’s point that “Each juror’s interpretation of witness testimony depends on his view of how truthful people are, how to tell when they are lying, how likely the events they describe are to have happened, an enormous body of information based on previous experience. There is no way to reach a verdict on the basis of nothing but trial evidence.” Indeed so. As Lord Peter said of Miss Climpson:

They bullied her a good deal, of course, because she couldn’t lay a finger on any real weakness in the chain of evidence, but she said the prisoner’s demeanour was part of the evidence and that she was entitled to take that into consideration. Fortunately, she is a tough, thin, elderly woman with a sound digestion and a militant High-Church conscience of remarkable staying-power, and her wind is excellent. She let ’em all gallop themselves dead, and then said she still didn’t believe it and wasn’t going to say she did.”

The attacks on Pete Hegseth are not just the usual insanity, but a progression of the left's color revolution.

This article originally appeared at CapX.

On 4 December, the LSE Hayek Society organised a panel debate between Gary Stevenson and Kristian Niemietz on the question “Are the super-rich destroying the UK?” The article below is based on Niemietz’s opening remarks.

The British economy is not in great shape, and it has not been for quite some time. This is a statement of the obvious. 

We have had 18 years of exceptionally weak productivity growth, and as a result, 18 years of exceptionally weak growth in real incomes. This is an anomaly by the standards of the previous 200 years or so of economic history. 

On top of that, we also have a massive housing affordability crisis. In the 1990s, the average house price was less than four times the average annual gross salary. Today, it’s about eight times that. So we have the dreadful combination of a nearly stagnant economy with sky-high housing costs. 

These problems are not unique to this country, but they are more pronounced here than in most other developed economies, some of which have managed to avoid those problems altogether. Britain is performing badly relative to its own past, and relative to its peers. 

So it is unsurprising that people from very different parts of the political spectrum are asking themselves why that is, and what can be done about it. What has caused this slowdown in economic growth? What has caused the housing crisis? And how do we get out of this situation? 

Gary Stevenson thinks that he has discovered the root cause of Britain’s malaise: wealth inequality. In his version of events, the super-rich are monopolising all the assets, including property and they are using the returns on those assets to buy even more assets—a self-reinforcing downward spiral. A small, super-wealthy elite is getting wealthier and wealthier, while the rest of the country is sinking into abject poverty. 

Gary has assembled a mass following on the basis of this thesis, so it is clearly persuasive to a lot of people. It is also completely wrong, for a number of reasons. 

For a start—wealth inequality is not even particularly high in this country. It is not high by historical standards, and it is not high by international standards. 

The wealthiest 1% hold about 22% of the total wealth. That is much less than it used to be for most of the 20th century. It is also much less than it is in most of the rest on the world. The EU average is about 25%, Japan is about the same, and in the US, that share is more than 35%. 

This is not a defence of the current distribution of wealth. The point is simply that if we want to know why Britain is doing badly relative to its peers, and relative to its own past, we need to find some factor that makes present-day Britain, to some degree, different from its peers, and different from its own past. Whatever that factor is—it is not wealth inequality.

So much for wealth inequality. But Gary’s argument also breaks down on a different level. 

Let’s have a look at the composition of wealth at the top of the distribution: what types of assets do the super-wealthy own? 

Among households with net wealth levels of £5 million or more, over 40% of that wealth is business wealth. These are people who own successful businesses. Obviously, this does not mean that they’re all self-made entrepreneurs: business wealth can be inherited. We are not living in an Ayn Rand novel, where the wealthy are all self-made superheroes. But the point is that business wealth is not the sort of wealth that they have taken away from anyone else, or that they are just passively hoarding without doing anything with it. It is certainly not the sort of wealth that is fixed in supply, like gold or Rembrandt paintings. 

Financial and pension fund wealth also accounts for over 40% of the wealth portfolio of the households with more than £5m in net wealth. Property wealth, on the other hand, is not a huge part of it: a sixth of the total at most, and probably less if we go further up the wealth distribution. 

This makes perfect sense. As people get wealthier, they can buy more shares and bonds, but it makes no sense for them to buy more and more residential properties. Even Elon Musk can only be in one place at a time, so there would be no point in him owning thousands of homes, even though he could easily afford that.   

So it is clearly not the case that the super-wealthy are hoarding all the property. We can also see this if we look at the raw numbers. In this country, the rate of second home ownership is astonishingly low—one of the lowest in Europe. In France, where they build a lot more, it is completely normal for better-off people to have holiday homes, on the coast or in the countryside. In the UK, that is a rare luxury. Only about 3% of the population have a second home (which usually means a holiday home in Cornwall, Devon, or the Welsh coast, not a place in a major population centre).

So if wealth inequality is not the issue—what is?

It is something extremely mundane and unexciting: we have made it too difficult to build anything in this country. We are not building houses, we are not building business premises, we are not building infrastructure, we are not building power stations—we are not even building water reservoirs. 

Britain is 4 million homes short of the European average. Similar data for office buildings, retail and hospitality venues is harder to come by, but there has to be a similar gap for those. The road network is about a third below EU average. Electricity output is about a third below the EU average. Britain needlessly deprives itself of some of the key input factors of a prospering economy, much like the pot of a Bonsai tree deprives the roots of the tree the space it needs to grow. 

And that, ultimately, is the main problem with this obsession with wealth inequality. It is not just that it lends itself to bad policy prescriptions, like the wealth tax. The bigger problem is the opportunity cost. Every minute we spend talking about wealth taxes and wealth inequality is a minute we no longer spend talking about how to build things. It is a minute we can no longer spend developing an agenda of “Abundance Yimbyism” applied to a British context.

An agenda of Abundance Yimbyism would not have to be a free-market libertarian agenda (although it would be even better if it were). It could have distinct centre-left flavours, as it does in the US. 

But the British Left is distracted with other things, such as obsessing about the non-issue of wealth inequality. Wealth is not fixed, but political energy very much is, and it is in short supply. At the moment, too much of it is wasted on dead-end projects such as “Gary’s Economics.”