Links for September
Switzerland, China, Jane Austen, and Boris Yeltsin
I’ve just passed 500 subscribers. Thank you all. To celebrate, I’m going to share a collection of some of the things I’ve read, listened to, or done in the past month.
Links
How the Swiss would have built HS2. Key to Swiss planning is recognising that the product of the railways is the timetable, but they also have a much better funding model. Switzerland has an infrastructure fund, and the railways can consistently and predictably draw down on it every year. This means they know exactly what they can afford. Compare Britain, where nobody knows how much money the Treasury will release in any given year. “In trying to save money, the Treasury is, unintentionally, the biggest driver of waste and inefficiency in UK infrastructure.” Preach.
Systems thinking is one of those buzzwords that makes you sound sage and intelligent, but, empirically, it’s nonsense. Trying to fix the system just makes it worse and more complicated. Success comes from starting small, rather than trying to re-tie a Gordian Knot.
If you’re not as terminally online as I, you mightn’t have the foggiest idea what ‘NPC’ or ‘permanent underclass’ mean, or how the words ‘agency’ and ‘taste’ are being used nowadays. Fortunately, this dictionary has you covered.
Why are infrastructure costs so high in Anglosphere countries? Preemptive risk aversion. This was one of those articles which led to many puzzle pieces falling into place all at once. It explains what has gone wrong much more satisfactorily than the standard NIMBY analysis, and might also the association between the common law and high infrastructure costs. (I would say, though, it’s not especially well-written; I had to read it twice to understand it fully.)
A map of how much the trains run on an hourly Takt in different places. This means that the same service pattern is rigidly repeated every hour. In Switzerland and The Netherlands, everything does, while in Poland and France almost nothing does. In Britain, I’d be interested to see it broken down by operator, which would probably explain why the pattern is so mixed.
An web app to let you estimate high-speed rail ridership. This was sent to me by no fewer than five people, so it’s safe to say that my friends know me well…
Good news – The Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers are hiring for an AI Alignment Alignment Alignment Researcher!
You have probably already read James Marriott’s article about the post-literate society. If you haven’t, read it. If you have, read it again.
What’s it like being a police officer in London?
In other policing news, yet another person has been preposterously arrested for posting something bad taste on the Internet. I am basically a free speech maximalist – I would like to see Britain enact a Free Speech Act which offers equivalent protections to the US’s First Amendment. But more prosaically, why the hell are the police continuing to prioritise arresting people for mean tweets???
What happened when Boris Yeltsin came to Chequers? He went down the pub with John Major. “At this final suggestion, Yeltsin perked up considerably, shouting gleefully, ‘Gins and tonic! Gins and tonic!’” British soft power at its finest.
‘I do nothing and it is breaking me’ from r/TheCivilService. When I was a de facto civil servant (a consultant, but working much more closely with the client than most consultants would), my experience was similar, although not quite as bad.
The latest antics from Natural England: forcing a kite-flying festival to move to a field with no wind. I don’t know what they think they’re doing; after the Bat Tunnel threw them into the public consciousness, they should surely have realised that they are at risk of being abolished, either by this government or the next.
Switzerland’s apprenticeship system is run by employer associations rather than universities or government bureaucracies. This seems to be key to its success. Reading this, I was reminded of how Bar training works; the decentralised nature of pupillage means that the profession is fundamentally responsible for passing on its own traditions of knowledge.
AI could lead to Coasean bargaining at scale. Coasean bargaining is the logical next step from the fact that rights are resources. As I explained in that post, the pub and the judge could trade their rights to make noise/peace and quiet. In practice, however, this doesn’t happen, because the transaction costs are too high; you normally have to get lots of people to agree to buy or sell their rights. AI might, however, massively cut down the transaction costs. I’m slightly sceptical.
“Where Disney aims to entertain, Ghibli wishes to enchant.” It also turns out that Miyazaki was influenced by the pre-Raphaelites.
It may be much easier for Labour to remove its leader than everybody seems to think. If Starmer is removed on or before 12 July next year, then we’ll have had seven Prime Ministers in ten years. We’ll be like Italy or Japan, only without the urbanism and the high-speed rail.
Every geologic eon that we spend evolving bigger and bigger chimp brains is just inflating the bubble a little more and making the eventual collapse even more painful. And God, you know I respect you, some of your early work on neural networks was genuinely groundbreaking, but honestly you’re the worst offender here. All of this talk about “the image of the divine” and “the pinnacle of creation” is just an excuse to keep the money flowing and leave angel investors holding the bag.
What were the three largest cities in the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse? Obviously Moscow, the artist formerly known as Leningrad, and the place we now affectionately call Kyiv. But what was the fourth largest city? Tashkent. Uzbekistan is slightly bigger than Poland and slightly smaller than Canada, which is one of those facts that makes your sense of reality go slightly awry: in my head it’s about the size of Austria. (Incidentally, of the top ten biggest ex-Soviet cities, six are now known to English speakers by different names from 1991.)
Save the Irish Maths Olympiad!
Maybe you’re not Actually Trying. “People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.” This is from Useful Fictions, a Substack run by Cate Hall, a US Supreme Court advocate-turned-professional poker player-turned-writer. It’s self-help, for smart people.
The Government have announced the location for twelve ‘new towns’, only four of which are actually ‘new’. This branding is irksome and betrays Britain’s continual obsession with replaying the Greatest Hits of the period 1945–1990 (see also: the nauseatingly endless comparisons of Kemi Badenoch to Margaret Thatcher). But at least they seem to be in sensible locations, and it’s nice to see that the posting-to-policy pipeline has led to Tempsford’s selection. I’m not sure that ‘Brabazon and the West Innovation Arc’ will catch on as a name, though.
Books
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang. Wang’s thesis, written in a style refreshingly literary for a non-fiction book, is that China is an engineering state, while America is a lawyerly society. This is good and bad for both countries. Being run by engineers gets you China’s impressive high-speed rail network, but the tendency to see everything as an engineering problem leads to punitive social engineering like One Child Policy and Zero Covid. A lawyerly society, meanwhile, is obsessed with process, and as a result builds nothing – but if America tried to do any social engineering, it would immediately get bogged down in litigation.
I’ve read two very good critiques of the book (one, two) which both make the same basic point – the book totally ignores the role of the Party. I think this is fine. All models are wrong, but some are useful, and I think that for Wang’s ‘China and America 101’ book, the engineers/lawyers dichotomy is useful.
(Wang also went on the Works in Progress podcast and recommended a Suzhounese restaurant in London which, I can confirm, is excellent.)
Tom Westgarth asks – Where does Britain fit? We certainly have a lot of lawyers. But we’re not as lawyerly as the Americans, and there are many European countries with more lawyers in government that are better at building things than us. Instead:
Britain’s issue might be described as a ‘managerial paralysis’ - a surplus of managers, lawyers, HR staff and generalist consultants that tie internal bureaucracies in knots, rather than through courtroom litigation.
As a generalist consultant-turned-lawyer, I can but blush. I suppose I shall have to go into HR if I crash out of the Bar.
Alternatively, I could work in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. Laying down the Law by Daniel Greenberg is a fascinating little exposition of how Acts of Parliament get drafted. It sounds like a fascinating job to have, a mixture of the art of storytelling and precise legal science. On a related note,, somebody clearly had fun writing the OPC’s guide to drafting legislation (“Avoid double negatives wherever it is not impossible to do so.”)
Emma. I am a little embarrassed to say that I don’t read very much fiction. This is a lifelong habit; even when I was a small child, I preferred to read facts rather than stories. My flatmate, my ex and my mother have all tried to get me to read more fiction, with absolutely no success. I dutifully read the set texts for English ‘A’ Level, enjoyed most of them, and failed to turn it into a habit. I am not quite sure why I find it so hard to read literature – I fully accept the intellectual case that I ought to read more. Perhaps a hint can be found in my writing this post partly to procrastinate finishing Emma.
What is keeping me going through the novel is Jane Austen’s use of language. She constructs sentences with a poise and delicacy that is rare among authors today. (It is also remarkable to note how little the English language has changed in two centuries). But above all, Austen is just funny.
The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable.
Will I read more fiction after this? I mean, I should. Literature is a way of finding out more about people, a subject which I find endlessly fascinating. I identify with Emma far more than I really ought to. Her meddlesome scheming and interfering her friends’ lives hits a little too close to home. I don’t even have a Mr Knightley to tell me off. And I definitely know both an endlessly-wittering Miss Bates, and an obliviously crass Mrs Elton.
Academic writing
Judicial Review of Administrative Action Across the Common Law World. Specifically, the chapters on Singapore and Australia. Australia is particularly interesting, having codified JR in the 1970s (albeit without much success; the courts soon found a way around it). Part of this involved creating a tribunal which could review administrative action on its merits, which could be a model for Britain. Not everything should be subject to its jurisdiction, but it would partly help end the spectacle of claimants scrambling around to find minor errors of law purely because they disagree with the merits of the decision.
Miscellaneous
I spent the first few days of September in Warsaw. Its urbanism is the worst of any city I have ever been to. For which we can blame the Nazis. The Old City has been nicely restored, but it’s tiny and full of tourists. Everywhere else is the picture of ugliness: wide roads mainly lined with commieblocks.
Warsaw is, however, building a lot, and while the modern stuff is a bit soulless, it’s much more pleasant than the commieblocks – the sort of stuff you’d get in Canary Wharf or King’s Cross. It’s tremendously easy to believe that Poland is going to be richer than Britain by the end of the decade. I was staying in a flat that cannot have been built more than a year ago, and it had two features that no new-build in Britain would have: (1) high ceilings and (2) air conditioning.
It was also slightly disconcerting to come across a branch of Caffè Nero that appeared to have lost its bearings:
Warsaw is the new Kyiv, and if you’re after Ukrainian cuisine, I can heartily recommend Willa Biała. On another food note, having spent a lot of time this summer on European trains, I have decided that SBB have the best food (albeit at Swiss prices), with Polish railways coming a close second (and it’s at Polish prices).
Finally, I went to see ABBA Voyage. It is an excellent show, and I can recommend being in the nosebleed seats – it works better the higher up you are. Reanimating ABBA is obviously an example of stuck culture, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It got me thinking: Which other bands would I like to see reincarnated as Pepper’s ghosts? The obvious answer is The Beatles, but it feels like there is something sacrilegious about that. Besides, Paul is doing a great job of representing them.
I wish you're point about natural England was true but it isn't; they will never be abolished because the electorate will throw a complete fit - same (probably even more so) with the building safety regulator. Every time I see something that gives me a little optimism for the future of the UK I come back down to earth when reminded of this fact.