Meeting People
Chris Snowdon: public health nemesis, timezone activist, epidemiologist, military strategist, energy analyst, and more...
Puritans of old used theology as a tool to proscribe behaviour they disapproved of. Their descendents use statistics. In my latest episode I speak with Chris Snowdon who is head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. We discuss the law of unintended consequences when it comes to public health measures and some of the spurious justifications provided for their enforcement. Not only is Chris a very thoughtful commentator but also a funny one. Beyond dissecting long term plans to ban tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and unhealthy foods, we try to define populism without much success. We also cover lockdowns, mask mandates, social media addictivity, the Blob, ISIS's tobacco policy and the general quality of our politicians and journalists today. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and learned a lot so hope you do too.
Chris is an author of several books including Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. You can find him on X: @cjsnowdon, https://twitter.com/cjsnowdon
Puritans of old used theology as a tool to proscribe behaviour they disapproved of. Their descendents use statistics. In my latest episode I speak with Chris Snowdon who is head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. We discuss the law of unintended consequences when it comes to public health measures and some of the spurious justifications provided for their enforcement. Not only is Chris a very thoughtful commentator but also a funny one. Beyond dissecting long term plans to ban tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and unhealthy foods, we try to define populism without much success. We also cover lockdowns, mask mandates, social media addictivity, the Blob, ISIS's tobacco policy and the general quality of our politicians and journalists today. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and learned a lot so hope you do too.
Chris is an author of several books including Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. You can find him on X: @cjsnowdon, https://twitter.com/cjsnowdon
Hello everyone and welcome to Meeting People with me, amal Pandia. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long-form conversations with rebellious, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits, and today I'm thrilled to have an old friend called Chris Snowden, who is head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. So hi, chris, nice to have you on. Thanks for spending the time Nice to have you, yeah, there you go. Yeah, quick question what the hell is lifestyle economics?
Speaker 2:Well, I am the inventor and foremost practitioner.
Speaker 2:Category creator of lifestyle economics. Yeah, lifestyle economics, it's just a way of trying to pull in the issues I'm interested in, which are mainly what you might call nanny state issues, but looking at them through the lens of economics, welfare economics, in particular, conventional, you know, nickel and dime economics as well, and we sort of invented the title, basically, when I came here at the IA over a decade ago and the idea was let's, rather than comment on these stories, you know, at Hock, let's really look at them systematically. Yeah, gambling, smoking, vaping, alcohol, sugary drinks, fatty foods, all this kind of stuff, it's always in the news, there's always proposals to ban or restrict them in some way. And so let's, you know, try and work out, you know, rationally, using economic thinking, what is the best approach to these things. Because we're not saying it should be a free for all, not saying, you know, do what you want. There should be some regulation.
Speaker 2:Clearly, the fact that a lot of these products are restricted to adults shows that, you know, regulation is perfectly appropriate, but what's the right level of it? Clearly, prohibition is going to be too far, for me at least, but total laissez-faire is too little. So, you know, there are actually perfectly sensible, normal economic frameworks by which you can look at these issues and essentially boils down to where's the market failure? You know, if there's a problem with this product, what's the market failure? What are people not understanding about this product? Right, If they're over consuming it, which is what the public health people think, firstly, can you prove that they're actually over consuming it or are they doing too much of something that you don't approve of, which is very different.
Speaker 2:That's not a market failure, that's just a difference of opinion. But it might be that people genuinely don't know that eating too many cream cakes is bad for their health, in which case maybe the government should tell them. Now, as it happens, people actually do know that eating too many cream cakes is bad for their health, so there isn't really a market failure there, or there could be negative externalities, you know, it could be that on health, yeah, the most.
Speaker 2:There you go the most common claim is and you had it recently with the Tony Black Institute for global governments what? It was called, said that obesity is now costing wider society £100 billion a year. Well, you know, if it's costing the taxpayer £100 billion a year, maybe we should be taxing green cakes, right? But in actual fact, you look at these figures wider society does not mean what people maybe think. It means at all.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to come on to that, the kind of use of data, statistics, figures, as something to kind of back justify, you know, preheld opinions. But before we do that, can you just give us a like potted history of lifestyle interventions by the state? And the reason I ask is I think most people listening, or most people out there, have in their minds kind of a beginning and an end, so that we've kind of read about Cromwell banning Christmas and theatre in the Interregnum and we've watched a few Archipelan films and we know about prohibition in the 20s. But what are the key things that people should know in history in terms of policy, about lifestyle, economics, to exist so that they're better armed and equipped as to why we are where we are today?
Speaker 2:It's a big question.
Speaker 2:I guess my answer would be that there are always people who are morally repulsed by certain behaviours, most of which you can find in the Bible, most of which have been banned in some places at some point in history. Gambling Gambling was basically banned in Britain until 1960. Apart from a bit of, on course, book making, there weren't casinos. There wasn't a lottery until the 90s. So, yeah, gambling has often been banned, sometimes for religious reasons, sometimes not. Alcohol, obviously, has been banned. It's mentioned prohibition in the 1920s. Lots of Islamic countries still ban it today. Smoking my first book was about the history of anti-smoking. It's been banned plenty of times not in this country, although maybe soon and yeah, food's never been really restricted.
Speaker 2:The worries about people getting too fat is a new thing, except, I suppose, going back to the Bible, where you could say that greed and sloth and so on the deadly sins. So maybe obesity hasn't been seen as a big problem before because it hasn't been much of it, or the only people who were obese were rich and they were making the rules.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so has there been. I mean, the other thing I remember reading about is the desire to kind of other lifestyles, interventional lifestyles like literature and culture and music. So Lady Chathley's Lover, or in Communist Russia Jazz was banned. There seems to be, whereas if we look at it today, actually there's not much appetite really. I know there's some talk about rewriting Roald Dahl and that kind of thing, but there's not much appetite to ban culture lifestyles. But there is increasing appetite to kind of intervene on kind of things that are unhealthy. Are we actually in an illiberal age or is this actually a bit of a golden age if you look at the history? Because there's always this push-pull tension between people who want to control and people who want to kind of live and let live. And this is just another period like any others, but actually it's not too bad.
Speaker 2:No, I think we maybe have lived through as much of a golden age as we're going to, Okay, and it didn't last very long. I would say maybe the 90s and most of the noughties.
Speaker 2:perhaps you could argue 60s, 70s, 80s in there as well to some extent. In terms of what I'm talking about, the Nanny State stuff, arguably things have been things are reasonably good between, let's say, the 60s and 2007, when the smoking ban came in, which I thought was a totemic moment really. Since then it's been open season and all sorts of activities. So, no, I don't think we're living in a particularly liberal society and I think it's getting worse quite rapidly. And I also see this whole Nanny State agenda as being part of the sort of counter-enlightenment that we're living through and the sort of cultural revolution, the iconoclasm tearing down statues, rewriting books this is going on.
Speaker 2:I used to think that public health academics were particularly corrupt, really, particularly fanatical or ideological, but actually you look at all sorts of academics. Now, thanks to Twitter in particular, we can see what a lot of these people are thinking and the weird sensoriness on campus. I think it's all part of a parcel, of a sort of post-truth, deeply ideological, kind of narcissistic and very authoritarian view of the world verging on to its art area in a micro management of people's lifestyles.
Speaker 1:Can I pick you up on something you said earlier, because you said there's a bit of a religious origin to some of the things that are frowned upon and you could also make a counter-argument that the Bible endorses a good, hearty Christmas and a good hearty Sunday lunch, and there's plenty of things. Do your work, enjoy your life. And I feel like since the end of religion, has kind of nature predicted that we have. You know, science has taken over religion in terms as the new religion in many ways, and we no longer render on to God what is God's and render on to Caesar what is Caesar's. There is no more God's. So everything, all the rendering, is done by Caesar.
Speaker 1:So the state is actually the one that's in charge of your moral compass. So you take a country like Portugal, for example, which is like a great example, I think, of just letting people get on with their lives, and there's a deeply Christian kind of culture in Portugal, which means that you know life is okay, whereas in more atheistic societies and more Protestant societies more Protestant, yes, more that actually it's the death of religion that is causing a lot of this, because people are finding a new home for their religious beliefs, to kind of, whether it's climate change or it's, you know how much exercise you should be doing, how much you should be doing. So do you think the lack of religion is to cause to some extent?
Speaker 2:I think it's a. It's an interesting point. It is an interesting point that people need a moral code and without religion, they have to start getting the state involved. I think there is actually a lot of truth in that. But also you have to remember that you know, when we say that traditionally, the war on gambling, on alcohol, what have you was being led by religions, it's just because the war and everything was led by religions, right? Actually, humans beings have lived in very religious societies and so that in a, whatever this illiberal drive that people have is, whatever this urge to impose your lifestyle on other people, whatever that is that found that became manifest through religion. Okay Now, so I think it's the risk of putting a cup before the host and saying, well, it's just religious people like that. No, I think religions were like that because people are like that, and now the state is like that because people are like that.
Speaker 2:You know, that drive hasn't gone away. It's a bit like when, when people are accused of being Marxists because they have, in my opinion, quite foolish ideas about how the society should be operated. Most of them never read Marx. They just fall into the same intellectual trap that Marx did. These, these, these fallacies and mistakes have been in human beings for a very, very long time and they manifest in different ways. So there is an. In some people it was actual Marxism, and with some people, you know, against booze or gambling, they would have been Methodists or they would have been Muslims or they are Muslims now. But getting rid of the religions doesn't get rid of that urge. I don't understand why the urge is, because I obviously don't. You know, I really don't feel that way about I don't want I don't want to impose my lifestyle on other people.
Speaker 2:I do obviously think my lifestyle is better. I think my choices are better because it's subjective and I wouldn't make the choices if it didn't think they were better, but I don't want to impose them on people. I don't care what people do, but some people do care very deeply, whatever the people do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's when you socialize things like health. I think there's a when people aren't responsible for the outcomes of their lifestyle choices. Let's say so. If I live unhealthily, that means I'm going to have to spend more on my health care at some point in my life and therefore I better take more responsibility. Well, actually, that responsibility has been taken away from me and it's been collectivized, and so therefore the responsibility falls on the government or society to make me act more healthily for the sake of the collective.
Speaker 2:The socialized medicine creates moral hazard. Basically, is what it's about. Again, people say this and I think there might be a bit of truth in it, but I'm not sure there's any evidence for it. I'm not sure there's any evidence that people were living healthier lives and taking better care of themselves before we had socialized medicine. I don't see any evidence that people in America, you know, watch their weight because they haven't got health insurance right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, possibly because people have to pay for health insurance in America, that they've got lower smoking rate. Actually because I think you have to pay a bigger premium for being a smoker. I think that's one reason America's got such a low smoking rate despite having very little anti smoking legislation, but maybe that's by the by. Again, I think it's a bit of an excuse. You know people will constantly say we need to clamp down on the all these things I don't like because it's costing the NHS money.
Speaker 2:Why should I have to pay for them? I don't care if you want to smoke yourself to death, but I have to pick up the pieces. People say this all the time, but I don't believe this and say I think they're just trying to find an acceptable justification for what is actually in a liberal society, one unacceptable thing to say, which is I know better than you and you're going to do this for your own good, okay, and I have explained hundreds of times to people over the years that actually smokers do not impose a net cost on society because, frankly, they tend to die younger and therefore we save a lot of money on pensions and healthcare and old age and social care and so on. And loads of studies have shown this.
Speaker 2:And I haven't persuaded everybody of this, but I've persuaded a lot of people of it. They get it when you think about it. It just kind of makes sense. But if they already believed in clamping down on smoking before, they don't change your mind because I've destroyed that argument. They just switch to another argument. You have to knock down a lot of arguments, sometimes with people, before they actually say what they really think, which is basically I don't like smoking. I don't like smoking. I don't like fat people.
Speaker 1:Well, can I actually? That's. You mentioned two things in conjunction. I actually would like to. What you say resonates, but I'd like to challenge it only from the perspective that I don't. I have an intuition that you can't genuinely know the impact of something like smoking or society. We just don't have the data set or the capabilities to analyze and crunch, and the reason is that smoking brings with it other lifestyle choices. I know plenty of fit, active people who smoke and they're not going to die young. I mean, yes, there's a Russian roulette argument, but like the reality is that, like with any study, whether it's nutrition, whether it's exercise, the most serious scientists will argue that actually, because we can't control for it, right, we can't, we can't just keep everyone's life exactly the same, but take, add the exercise in, because when you start exercising, you start eating better and you start smoking less.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you have different personalities.
Speaker 1:You've got different and just everyone's, and also everyone's bodies are different, right? So like everyone reacts to things differently, so are you. Are you playing a by wrapping economics around lifestyle choices, almost falling into their trap by speaking on their turf or fighting on their terrain? Because you can't? You can't predict these things and actually deliver, and let's live thing is more powerful than the statistics thing. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Well, I think they're fine on my patch because I work for an economic think tank and they're using economic arguments and they don't know what they're talking about. Basically, and, as I say, lots, of, lots of studies using all sorts of different methodologies have shown what I'm saying is correct. But smokers cost society, cost the government, less than non smokers do, and I think, reasonably simple thought experiment shows it's not just smokers, by the way.
Speaker 2:You know, the majority of preventive health measures end up costing more than they they save. Right, because you need to look at what would happen if these people didn't do these risky things. There are one or two things like childhood vaccinations will save you money Anything involving saving people from dying at a young age. You can stop young motorcyclists from dying. That will save you money. Reason being you spend a lot of money putting people through school. You don't want them dying straight away.
Speaker 2:I'm talking here purely for economic terms you understand, whereas if someone dies on the day of their retirement of a heart attack, instantly, that's the absolute result for the government. That's a perfect scenario Every day. Beyond that point, they're going to be taking more out of the pot that they're putting in putting in. So I think the economics on this is absolutely rock solid. I wouldn't keep making the case. We're enough for people constantly saying the opposite, and then what happens is I say what I've just said to you and they say that's outrageous. You're encouraging people to die young to save the government money. Well, no, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that this argument that is constantly used is not true. So pick a different argument.
Speaker 1:Right, so let's. I mean you talked about Marx earlier. You know for what little marks I have read.
Speaker 2:it's full of charts and data, and Really, I think it's just, I think it don't really Well guesswork.
Speaker 1:Well, him and his. Very, very bold assumptions His very rich manufacturing mate Engels, used to kind of he was in Northern Engels, manchester. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Big Fox Hunter.
Speaker 1:Big Fox Hunter.
Speaker 2:yeah, Mark's never stepped foot in a factory his entire life, I believe.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:He was mainly in the British Library, Okay, well.
Speaker 1:I think this is one of my big bugbears is kind of use of statistics in complex systems to kind of justify. You know you mentioned something earlier, but there's plenty of studies that prove my point and I kind of. There's also plenty of studies. Just how do I be more skeptical when someone Like what I read something recently was 38% of children in the year 6?
Speaker 2:in England are obese apparently.
Speaker 1:Now, who's gathered that data? How have they done it? Why is it robust? Is it true?
Speaker 2:You got me on one of my pet subjects. I think I'll resist the temptation for spending 10 minutes explaining it to you and just point. If anybody's interested, look up, type in. You know, snowden critic, childhood obesity You'll find my article and the critic explaining this. It's one of the most ludicrous statistics going there the idea that four out of 10, 11-year-olds are overweight. I've got a 12-year-old daughter and I'm familiar with children of that age group, picking them up from school and so on, seeing them play football, and it's just nowhere near True. Right, and you go, well, that's how you do it. 11-some-one and it's kind of.
Speaker 2:You know, it's still evidence right, you're going around and supposedly, nearly half the kids are overweight and, quite clearly, only about two or three percent of them are, and it might be a little bit different in different parts of the country. I accept that, but I don't live in a particularly rich area, you know. It's just not true. I can, as I say, I've looked into why it's not true and it's pretty insane actually when you find out how they created this threshold of childhood obesity and childhood overweight. But no, it is absolutely not true. You're broad a question. How do you decide how does any layman decide to work out a judge whether the evidence they're being given is correct or not? Well, they can't really. We're not spending a huge amount of time. You can follow my Twitter feed.
Speaker 2:I got to do a full-time job writing about these terrible claims that we've made all the time. I find it quite interesting. Most people don't. So no, you mean, basically, people will trust authority, generally speaking, you know, and you should be able to trust authority, and it's a real shame that you can't. But it's not just public health, it's, you know, a lot of academia has just gone down this horrible wormhole whereby they say what they want to be true, what is true.
Speaker 1:Well, we saw that in COVID and we see that with economics. I mean, economics is the ultimate tool of like oppression and or, you know, ex -post-justification for policies that have no kind of rational. Well, forecasting is garbage, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Right In most areas, unless you've got something that's very straightforward. Forecasting is terrible and if you've got people who've got a certain agenda, then we give forecasters far too much power. You know, I think, that the COVID scenarios forecasts, not predictions. At forecasts, apparently, there's a difference in a forecast and a prediction. My dictionary says they're basically the same thing, but according to COVID models, these are only forecasts and not predictions. But they obviously were predictions. They were predictions of what would happen under certain scenarios.
Speaker 2:And you get to July 2021 when Boris Johnson wants to have Freedom Day and the forecast said if you go ahead with Freedom Day, you are going to have a massive number of people dying from COVID and it's going to spiral very, very rapidly. And it didn't. It came down. It came down within days of the final of Euro 2021 or Euro 2020, whatever we're supposed to call it which any common sense armchair epidemiologist could have forecast. That's when everybody was socializing Right.
Speaker 2:And then you get to Omicron, six months later, and all the models going oh this is dreadful. We basically need to lock down again. They were wrong and they were all wrong in the same wrong direction of being way too Pessimistic Pessimistic, and I can't, you know, looking at the sort of maths of it, I can't work out how every single, even their most optimistic projection was wrong, other than that the model has just were pessimistic and they were trying to bounce Boris Johnson into lockdown. In my opinion, economic forecasting is garbage as well. You've got who can possibly tell what GDP is going to be like in 2027. There's just no way of possibly knowing that. And yet the OBR and the Bank of England will come out of these figures and they'll be treated with respect, if not as gospel, despite the fact that every single one of these projections has been wildly off. All the projections have more than happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does my head is Brexit has been off.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I don't think they need to make these projections at all. If they do, they should just be an academic exerciser. A handful of people at Bank of England should look at them. They shouldn't be beamed across the BBC going oh my God, look at what's happening. We're going to be the worst in the G. How many times has Britain been the worst in the G20 or the G7? And when it comes down to it, we usually actually pretty average. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good old average Britain. Well, you know what I love about. You know, had the oil price not done that, I would have been right in my forecast. Or had there not been a recession in China, I would have been right in my forecast. Hang on, mate. Like that Isn't your model meant to suppose.
Speaker 2:Well, there are some exogenous factors, I guess you could say, like the war on Ukraine, where, okay, well, we didn't know that was going to happen. So that mess is at the forecast. Fair do's.
Speaker 2:But a lot of the time nothing, very much happens, and the forecast should be roughly accurate and it's not. And it's not their fault, I mean, nobody could forecast it properly. It's a complete guessing game really. I think with Brexit, again, you had this inbuilt pessimism of well, clearly this is going to be disastrous. So all the models again were more pessimistic than they should have been, but it all comes down to people's assumptions.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you assume that Brexit is going to be absolutely fiasco, then that's what your model is going to show. And they do a lot of modeling in public health, and I mean minimum unit pricing for alcohol. The evidence for that was almost exclusively modeling from one group of modelers in Sheffield and by and large it was very, very wrong and the policy never been tried before. So fair enough, put it through a model. But it was treated by the Scottish government as being absolutely, you know, to the nearest decimal point. This is what's going to happen. There will be 62 fewer deaths. Ludicrous level of certainty and accuracy about this stuff. The sugar tax also had a model you know turned out to be completely wrong. They're only as good as the assumptions go into it. And if the models are being created by people who are advocating for the policy they're advocating because they think it's going to work, so their model is going to show it's going to work. It could not do otherwise. It shows the biases of the person. That's all it shows.
Speaker 2:I mean, you might as well just do something on the back of an envelope, you know. Do you agree with policy? Yeah. Do you think it's going to work? Yeah, okay, there's a evidence. Make an impact assessment based on that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so stop me throwing the baby out of the bath hall. Today Is statistics. Can it be a useful tool? When can it be useful? When should we listen? Because I'll give you an example. I'm trying to be as open-minded as possible about the efficacy of mask mandates.
Speaker 2:Let's say Now I'm not saying whether they should be mandated.
Speaker 1:But do they work or not? I see the people who believe in mask mandates giving me lots of studies, so, and then people who don't say, oh, there's this Danish study that says this Like but what the hell? Whether we should do it or not is another question. Versus, does it actually work? And intuitively, you know, wearing a mask does work to help, you know, stop you helping someone else. That's why Asian countries do it. Before COVID it was like a thing If you have a cold, you wear it to go on public transport. It's a kind of etiquette thing to stop you passing on your thing to other people. But there's plenty of just this deafening like just constant war of statistics that just means that we lose, we can't see the wood from the trees and we can't get back to core principles. Is that like, should I be doing? Even if this is the case, is it worth it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, yeah, I mean I can't answer the question of whether the mask mandates work, so I genuinely don't know. I agree with you that masks must work in some context, which is why surgeons wear them and so on. Right, I don't definitely mean it. I mean it's possible for people to do something completely pointless for a sustained period of time, but the fact that they do it and the basic you know physics of the thing, you know, that some germs and viruses will get caught in the mask presumably leads you to think that it must have some sort of benefit.
Speaker 2:The question for me with that would be, as you kind of alluded to is the benefit big enough to force people to do something for months and months on end, or years on end in the case of poor medics, and I think you can say fairly clearly no, it's not worth it.
Speaker 2:You know, in the course of the pandemic there were two things that very clearly worked and you could see it, going back to statistics, by just looking at what happened. You know, over the previous year or wherever it was, lockdowns whatever a handful of people may say, lockdowns clearly led to a reduction in infections. You could see it every time we had a lockdown, and in other countries too. So long as the lockdowns were followed reasonably closely, they weren't completely flouted. It's really quite obvious just looking at a graph of infections, hospitalisations or deaths, with a certain lag after the lockdown began, it would rate decline. That worked and the vaccinations worked.
Speaker 2:Again, you can look at the graphs. You can see how many people were infected. You can see how many people died once people vaccinated the number of people who got infected continued to be very, very high with the various variants that were knocking around, but the number of people who died was very low and it continues to be really low now, incredibly low. They definitely were Mass mandates. I think the mass mandate came in in July 2020, I think all of a sudden, having, of course, the government proves they do not work at all.
Speaker 2:Don't waste time and money. Public Health England advised the Advertising Standards Authority to ban and advert four face masks in the early days of the pandemic because they said it was not just misleading to say that this might protect you from COVID, but actually outrageous. This is exploitation of public fears to tell people that face masks might help in any way with COVID-19. What a bunch of charlatans this company were. So the face mask mandate comes in in July 2020, it's not obvious at all to me that it made any difference. Right? Infections started rising. People were wearing them all over the place. I think the plan B thing was basically just wearing face masks. Remember plan B? It didn't have any marked effects, put it that way, not to say that cases wouldn't have been a little bit higher had nobody been wearing a face mask. Quite possibly that is true, but it didn't seem to me a big enough effect to require everybody to be doing it.
Speaker 1:I thought it was theatrical really, and it had some. And this is the challenge with modeling it had some negative impacts If you're a school teacher trying to, or a you know, yeah, they're likely to certainly impact it.
Speaker 2:Well, death people, I mean yeah.
Speaker 1:But even, for example, how do you include in your model about the positive benefits of lockdown the impact on schooling? Or lack thereof, or a single mom and a council tower plot with three kids and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, human wellbeing is not counted in this, and this is actually one of the big problems with the public health movement as it stands, not just with COVID, which is an extreme kind of example of it, but with all of it. You know they will go. This is we've got a model here and it's going to save 62 people's lives. Okay, right, well, what are the? What's the trade off that? What's the knock on effect? Right, you're raising the price of alcohol, so that's going to cost drinkers quite a bit of money. That's not good. That's a literal cost of this policy. You know, if this policy is going to cost tens of millions of pounds and hit the poorest hardest, is it really worth it to maybe save 62 people from drinking themselves to death? But people didn't want to have that conversation. They don't want to have that conversation with anything about anything. They certainly don't want to have it with COVID in the relatively early days of the pandemic around about May 2020.
Speaker 2:Toby Young wrote this article I don't know if you remember wrote an article for unheard or somebody, saying we need to do a cost-benefit analysis for this. We've been in lockdown for two months. Kids aren't going to school, lots of people are lonely. People aren't really going to hospital to get things treated or diagnosed. And you know, generally speaking, the Department of Health puts the value of a quality-justed life here about 60,000 pounds a year. So let's accept we're saving this many lives and that's worth this much in kind of monetary terms.
Speaker 2:What's the rest of it costing? What's the monetary cost of the things we're sacrificing, and of course a lot of it? There's no government department has any kind of financial estimate for an hour of enjoying yourself, you know, an enjoyable weekend with your family, seeing your friends. The things actually make life worth living and not monetized. And that's exactly the same with the boozing and the smoking and the gambling and so on. You can fully accept that these things have health effects. Of course they do, but people do them for a reason, which is that they really quite enjoy them and they wouldn't like to live without them. That would be a big cost to them. I'd love for them to live without them.
Speaker 1:I'd love to do some sort of study. I mean, it's just not possible, that's the thing. But the net positive benefits of alcohol over time in terms of the relationships, you know that fast, you fast track, bonding in a way that you just don't when you're sober, yes, which you just is immeasurable.
Speaker 2:So but the benefits could be could be, could be you know, huge, for I think there are real financial benefits there because drinkers get paid more than non-drinkers. And now, of course, you mentioned confounding factors. That could be all sorts of reasons for that, but one of them could well be that you know the down the pub you know, socializing with colleagues, networking.
Speaker 2:You know that kind of thing. You know we have a. You know, in economics you have the concept of consumer surplus, which is the monetization of the amount of enjoyment utility you get from doing something. But that too is quite difficult to measure. Other than that, we assume that it is more than the amount spent on the product. Okay, so people are spending 30 billion pounds a year on booze in this country. We assume that that is creating at least 30 billion pounds of enjoyment, enjoyment that the temperance movement would simply deny exists.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, that's I mean value is in the mind, which is that kind of Austrian indeed, and we've done is why it is your best of leaving people alone, because only they can put the valuation on whatever is they're buying and different people will value it very differently. You know around about half the population wouldn't smoke even if cigarettes were harmless, because about half the population doesn't get any enjoyment from nicotine. We kind of know that from just looking at the 1940s, when everyone thought smoking was harmless and healthy or even healthy.
Speaker 2:And about half the population didn't smoke. Some people tried smoking. Agatha Christie tried many times, she said, to smoke. She really wanted to but she just couldn't get on with it.
Speaker 1:She didn't like it at all Like the idea of it. It's a bit like me, I think. I like the idea, yeah, so when, when?
Speaker 2:when you know, get to the 50s and all the lung cancer studies start coming out, there's quite a few people relieved because they could finally give up. You know they didn't want to smoke in the first place. They were the first people to quit.
Speaker 1:Look, I went. I went to a, I listened to. I don't know how closely you've been following the ESG movement in investing.
Speaker 2:I mean, I buy all the ones that are boycotted by ESG. They do pretty well as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, funny enough. You know, defense stocks will all of a sudden matter when you're trying to when you're spending.
Speaker 2:I couldn't buy them. When the Ukraine war started, I tried to buy some on my app. I think my app is to sell BAE.
Speaker 1:Well, they did. The shares did very well. Unfortunately, I'm sure they did because people work out Well, I've got oil and I've got lots of salt.
Speaker 2:I've got oil and salt, my tobacco now, but booze is still quite strong On the tobacco.
Speaker 1:I mean, I listened to a talk by a well-regarded investment firm who you know argued the whole point about ESG is kind of investing in companies that you know improve that society beyond corporate profitability. So there's a broader responsibility to stakeholders and actually the best investment to make from an ESG lens is tobacco companies because they're disrupting their own business models through effectively cannibalizing their cash flow generative cigarettes by investing in vaping. Now, people, people listen to this, aren't on top of the kind of nuances of regulations pro against vaping. There was a documentary on Netflix which has created a lot of opinion. Oh, the dual one, the dual about the fact that, yeah, it's really good.
Speaker 2:I should.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm not bad enough. I thought it'd be. Well, is it called the big? I can't. The big vape, the big vape, I think that's it, so it's worth watching what you say.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, very good. I mean I assumed it would be anti vaping propaganda, like most of the stuff comes out of America to the movie Secrets is. But actually it was pretty balanced.
Speaker 1:So what do you say to kind of a dilettante, kind of you know non-industry specialist or lifestyle economist that you know vaping is actually a hugely positive thing If they go well. I just, I looks like they're targeted to children. I see lots of school kids doing it. I don't quite like it. Something about it doesn't feel like right. What's the base case that vaping is actually a huge? What feels to me like a huge positive?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's incredible innovation and it really depresses me to see so many people, particularly in public health, opposing something that is way more effective than the neighbour have been in stopping people smoking. Yeah and yeah, I had no intention of giving up smoking. I was a very prolific and committed smoker. I basically made my mind about I was going to take my chances with this because I liked it so much. You know, if it was a 50-50 chance I'd get a smoking right disease. I'd just, you know, hope for the best. And then I started dabbling with vaping and once I found, you know, reasonable quality e-cigarette and a flavour I'd go along with, that was it. I never looked back.
Speaker 2:So you don't smoke now at all, no, I got 200 cigarettes in my, in my drawer at home, which I bought over a year ago in America. Because it was so cheap, I couldn't resist buying them, and they have proper cigarettes in America as well, not this EU regulated rubbish. Limits the time, the nicotine content and I haven't smoked any.
Speaker 1:They're still there in my drawer. So cigarettes that we buy here, sorry, just to just to cut are?
Speaker 2:they're all basically ultra lights.
Speaker 1:now, they're all ultra lights, yeah, by the standards of the 60s. Yeah, they are literally all ultra lights Okay right, but but so you've got stuff that gives gives you the hit that you used to enjoy. But yeah, you don't like it because or you don't, you don't feel the need to.
Speaker 2:I'm quite happy. I mean, it's such a close substitute as far as I'm concerned that I feel no compulsion whatsoever to to light a cigarette. And now, not everyone's like that and I'm not gonna say, you know, we should force everyone to start vaping, of course, but for me it's, it's, it's bang on, and you think anti-smoking people would be happy with that right that somebody who's so committed to smoking he was no intention to give it up and more or less devoted his career to defending smokers even he gave up thanks to vaping. And maybe this has some potential. Right, and clearly has potential, because millions of people have given up thanks to vaping. So there's the straight way. You've got the paternalistic health argument right. You should like vaping. The libertarian argument is obviously what people should do, whatever they want. But this is pretty cool because it should give you more consumer well-being, right, it's giving more consumer surplus because it was cheaper, does the same kind of thing and it hasn't got any major health consequences. So, straight away, that trade-off is much more favorable to using nicotine, right, you enjoy using nicotine. Cool, now you can use it.
Speaker 2:About the health consequences the health consequences were a major part of the cost of smoking effectively, in addition to the very high cost from the high rates of taxation, and therefore we shouldn't be surprised if people are taking a vaping. That's the thing. We shouldn't be very surprised if the cost of it has effectively dropped, both financially and in terms of health, and the benefits of it in terms of just enjoying some nicotine, and remain more or less the same. So any economist would expect you to see a higher take of vaping. It goes back to what I was saying just a minute ago.
Speaker 2:Around about 50% of the population do have a. You know get benefits from using nicotine. They really enjoy it. The other half don't like it and apparently we're now just living in a world in which two halves are fighting each other and one half is is losing badly, partly because that half is drops in fact in practice to about 13%. So it's a tremendous free market solution to a public health problem and still people object to it, and they always have done. Long before there was even any concern about you know you vaping, they people objected to it immediately because they just thought it's a bit too much like smoking and the tobacco industry started selling these things. Now we want to destroy the tobacco industry, so we can't allow them to like move to selling something cheaper. You know that was something less harmful. So that was just, I think, largely just good, old-fashioned puritanism.
Speaker 2:The objection to vaping now yeah today there is more of a legitimate concern about about kids vaping, and it is not a good thing, absolutely agree. I just don't think kids should be using any form of drug, basically nicotine to drug, and it is shocking how young some of the people are who are vaping. I'm well aware of that. But we do have the laws on the books to stop this. It has been illegal to celebrate to an 18 year old for a long time, so it just needs enforcement of existing laws we managed to enforce the laws on tobacco pretty well.
Speaker 2:It's really very difficult for a kid to get a hold of cigarettes legally what not legally, but you know from a shop. And the same is true of vodka, you know. I'm not saying no, kids ever do it, but generally there'd be 16 or 17 wearing a false mustache or whatever you know, to go to a fairly shady retailer. To begin with, you're not going to walk in the test going by some vodka and facts right, whereas it seems to me that you've got kids as young as 10 or 11 going into corner shops buying unregulated vapes. So the vapes themselves are illegal a lot of the time and more dangerous as a consequence very often. And that doesn't seem to be, you know, trading standards don't seem to be doing anything about that. So it would be nice for once if the government tries to enforce the laws it already has before it starts making new ones.
Speaker 1:It feels like a fairly simple policing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's go do spot checks you know, send some kids in there as bait and you know, see which ones you know and then give them a 10 grand fine yeah, enough for that.
Speaker 1:That'll stop happening.
Speaker 2:Well, it seems we've done it. We're like I say, we've done it with cigarettes yeah so we are not in your mind then becoming a.
Speaker 1:Let me ask it another way. There's this continuity. Yeah, historians of empires will say that there's a kind of recurring theme of kind of clogs on the way up, silk slippers on the way down. We're in this kind of end of empire status where we're all obese, unhealthy sort of, and we're kind of, you know, taking too much pleasure in too many, too many a feat, because, like a full room yeah, the fault like and, but in your mind we're not an obese kind of unhealthy, kind of overly kind of drug-dabbled you know alcoholics culture.
Speaker 1:It's just statistics used by people with puritanical urges to control, using the certainty of future forecasting and modeling to kind of as a as their kind of chief weapon well, by and large, that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean, most of it is just, is just faked, right? Hr Menken said some paraphrase, but he said something like the practical business of politics is creating an endless series of hobgoblins with which to terrify the public, thus leading them to you know, come to the government, do I need to be rescued? And the series of hobgoblins are all imaginary. You know, now, not all of the hobgoblins you mentioned are imaginary. It is true that rates of obesity amongst adults is at a relatively high level of something like 26 percent, and obesity is a proper, you know, health hazard. It is a genuinely, you know, it's a condition. I know some people go oh well, what about these rugby players? They're obese. Yeah, there's people on the margins, as with any category, but actually obesity is a pretty reasonable definition, not for kids, as I say, but for adults it is, but the rest of it's all bullshit. Really.
Speaker 2:You know the problem gambling rate is ridiculously low 0.3 0.4 percent has been for 20 years. Smoking rates gone down. It's halved in the space of 20 years. And drinking people drink remarkably little. Not everybody, obviously not me but compared to young people are drinking less. Young people drink nothing, pretty much. I mean they go out, have one pint of craft beer for eight pounds and that's, that's a lot. Make it last all night, you know. So, yeah and less.
Speaker 2:The statistics are lying to us about this, but I don't see any reason why they would suddenly be wrong. People are genuinely, generally speaking, pretty moderate and there are no epidemics of, you know, drinking smoking. That's going to topple the NHS, as people claim. But in order to keep the panic going, these, you know, the goalposts have to be moved for one thing. So they keep changing. They're trying to change the definition of problem gambling right now to make it look like there's like eight times as many problem gamblers as there actually are. They just go do switch to online. They say instead of do a face-to-face interview, you go online and we go online. Suddenly there's a huge selection bias because it turns out, if you send someone an email saying would you like to take a survey about gambling, people who are interested in gambling which obviously include problem gamblers and more like say yes, and people are not interested in gambling. So you just whack up the figures it's a well known floor in the system.
Speaker 2:But the gambling commission is doing it anyway because it wants to exaggerate the number of problem gamblers so it can regulate gambling more, and you get this a lot in all sorts of areas. We had the drinking guidelines dropped a few years ago. It was the same people I mentioned from Sheffield University. They did some modelling on this. Their initial model actually backed up the existing guidelines at the time, which is 21 units for men and public health. England said, yeah, can you change this? You go what do you mean? Well, can you change your model? Can you make this assumption, this assumption, this assumption. And they said, to be fair to them, and this is all on the record, there's emails you know exist I've seen. They said, well, we wouldn't make that assumption because that's never gonna happen. And you just thought, just do it.
Speaker 2:And they said, well, we're gonna cost you seven grand, so it's fine and they did it and they changed the model and suddenly the model now supports 14 units for for men, which is what the government wants to do, or what public health England wants to do. So you get this goal post shifting, which requires some extremely sharp practice, but it's all designed to make problems look like they're getting worse when they're not.
Speaker 1:It sounds like a phenomenal grift if that's the way public servants are behaving. I mean, how much of to double click on obesity again? How much of this is just an issue that the human race is grappling with in the new age of abundance so, like now, it's just because food is plentiful exactly what it is, I think yeah, we'll just adjust to that. Accordingly, we'll learn not to have so many donuts every yeah every day, because we'll figure it out actually.
Speaker 2:I think that I think that's already happening actually. And again, if you, look at young people's diets, you know, not across the board, obviously, but they they seem, generally speaking, much more conscious of what they're eating than I was at that age, or indeed still am there's a theory.
Speaker 2:I have. I don't know if you can even gather evidence for it, but I have this theory very much in line with what you're saying. She's a kind of there's an intergenerational thing going on, because it's well known that people lower down the socio economic ladder are more likely to be obese than people who are rich. The difference is actually not quite as stark as sometimes is made out, but there's definitely a clear difference and I wonder whether, because we've had a shift from sort of a manufacturing economy to a service economy, it's going to take a while for people whose forefathers were in heavy industry to adjust their diet accordingly you know if you're in heavy industry.
Speaker 2:You can eat whatever you want, and the more the merrier really he's going to burn it off. Um, if you can, I can just around it doing tele sales. You're not going to do that, but if you're still used to eating what your parents fed you, then there's going to be a you know, a bit of weight put on. But you would think after a while people who are doing tele sales or certain offices will, will adjust to that and you know, maybe the government has some role in educating people about these things?
Speaker 2:I don't know, but I I do wonder, yeah, whether, whether people can adjust. On the other hand, people are so, um, physically inactive. Now, very often said, I think we've got to the point at which just the natural human appetite is going to bring in more calories and you're going to burn off. Do you know what I mean? Right, I mean you can only starve yourself to a certain extent. If you literally don't do any exercise whatsoever and you're not even sort of walking down the street, then I think it would require a lot of willpower to to eat as few calories as you should be doing yeah, I mean, I think I definitely agree that young, the younger generation of multiple conscious, of different diet, two two conscious do you reckon two conscious of all this?
Speaker 2:yeah, not having a high-priced contracts. Yeah, on anti-depressants yeah, they should have a drink so are you, are you familiar with Jonathan Haight? Yeah, yeah, okay, so like oh he's, he's theory about the, the smartphones and things yeah, what do you think about that? So basic, so just it's a good correlation yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some truth in it. It's almost two need to go correlation, do you think? Yeah, 2013 is exactly the point. This is the year that's so.
Speaker 1:Basically, people, the world went crazy people watching or listening to Jonathan Haight's, very respected psychologist, who argues that the social media effectively create, has has, particularly for young girls and I can see this as a as a father of two little girls that has created more anxiety amongst young people and more kind of self-conscious and more that they are. They're not a bunch of snowflakes. They are genuinely triggered or disturbed by things that they don't understand or not comfortable with or they don't like in a way that older generations just aren't.
Speaker 2:Because of the social media hacking of the brain, yeah but also they're very narcissistic and things going to yes, that comes into it too right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because they are. Their meaning has been wrapped around, you know, has been gamified by things like likes or rebus. Yes, exactly, and so they basically need to lighten up.
Speaker 2:Well, just throw away yeah, this, yeah, log off Instagram. I saw a study very recently being tweeted, I think probably by Height actually, which showed in America the majority of these kids, teenagers, whatever, actually hate Instagram, and if everybody else got off it, they would love to get off it too. There's this horrendous networking effect which makes them feel they have to have gone out, but it's actually. They know it's making them miserable.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they would like to delete the app, but they can't because everybody else is on it. Well, that's a pretty bad situation.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a US presidential candidate called Vivek Ramaswamy, if you're following him, but he argues that you know these things are as addictive, if not way more addictive than physical substances, because they literally hack into your dopamine system in a way that other things don't. So if you think that alcohols or tobacco should be illegal until the age of 18, because your brain is not formed yet to make condoms and free choices, actually you should be banning social media for kids under 18. Is that the nanny state in action, or do you have some sympathy with that? I have some sympathy with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, you know, I'm not against banning the sale of alcohol and cigarettes to kids, let's remember I do. Except that's perfectly reasonable. Paternalism is fine with kids, right.
Speaker 1:Literally yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just only becomes paternalism when you involve adults, isn't it? Yeah, I won't let my daughter use TikTok that way, you know, and I wouldn't be very. I've said she can have it when she's 13, but I'm not very keen on having her at she's 13, to be honest.
Speaker 2:I think TikTok is particularly pernicious because, not to get too conspiracy minded about it, like I do think it is partly being used by the Chinese to destroy the West. You know, I really find that quite incredible hypothesis, and even if it isn't, then I think that's going to be the effect. So whether it's deliberate or not, it's still a bad thing.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know if it's fake news, but you hear stories about. You know kids in China are being every every 10 TikToks have been told about maths or the reports.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they get a totally different version of TikTok that you can't use after 10pm.
Speaker 1:Now, that's absolutely true. I don't know if it stops at it's gage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, chinese TikTok algorithms are all you know. Pushes up the stuff about eating vegetables and things. Whereas ours just you know, I don't know, it's just absolutely mindless rubbish. That is just continuous. So look, I agree, I think we are engaging in an experiment with young people. We have no idea what the consequence is going to be, and they might be okay, you know, we might just raise a generation of kids who are actually very cynical about this kind of stuff and you know.
Speaker 2:I've seen a huge amount of information and know how to filter out the good from the bad. Or it could be absolutely disastrous and we raise a generation of narcissistic snowflake psychopaths or something which is a weird combination. We'll find out when they're snowflake psychopath.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I suppose, when we're all old and we'll see if they're looking after us or how they're looking after us, we'll figure out whether that's They'll just like our tweets as I mean.
Speaker 2:never say it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, chris you tweeted something in 2024. And I think that's kind of, you know, triggering me somewhat.
Speaker 2:So no dead of feet.
Speaker 1:Do you have a definition of populism?
Speaker 2:No, no, not really. It's used about everybody these days, isn't it? And a lot of these people have absolutely nothing in common. It seems to be just anything that doesn't fit into a kind of neat sort of Blair right, kind of right ideal, doesn't it really just people saying things that they you know for want of a better term metropolitan elite think are completely outside the boundaries of reasonable discussion, like leaving the European Union, for example, like leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, but also is quite like ideologically confusing because it mixes left wing ideas and right wing ideas. Yeah, that seems to be I think that's always been kind of part of populism is you can't define it as being left wing or right wing very easily, because they will tend to be in favor of a lot of state support for farmers or for various industries but at the same time, will be quite conservative in social issues.
Speaker 1:It's a term that really frustrates me, but where it does have some resonance is that long term worry I have about democracy, which is that ultimately, everyone votes themselves all the money and they'll vote for the party that gives them all the money from the people who are making it. And in the short term it's a word. That is anything I disagree with right a policy that's proposed I don't like, that has public traction, or a party that's one of an election that I don't like and therefore if my side wins, it's the democratic one of the people, but if the other side wins, it's horrible populist movement. But do you think there's something kind of fundamentally challenged with a post kind of welfare state democracy that will just lead to ever enlarging states? That, or is there a self correcting mechanism that we get every now and then, like in 1979?
Speaker 2:Both. I think it's probably the case. I think eventually there has to be a self corrected mechanism, because the state runs out of money and we're getting to that point now. Maybe this guy in Argentina, who's also described as a populist, a both, a populist, and, and a far, far right and the far right is another term that is used a bit too widely these days to describe all sorts of different people yeah, maybe you eventually hit a wall and you've got to do something quite radical to fix it. I think the the self correcting mechanism is just having politicians who are reasonably responsible, people who think beyond their own careers and beyond the next five years, and I think we did used to have those people.
Speaker 2:Genuinely, I don't think it's nostalgic to say that there were people in both the main parties who would not be completely reckless with the, with the public finances, and when Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he was committed to conservative spending limits for in the first term not after that, but for the first term and he stuck to them and we ran a surplus for a few years not very long, but we did it for a few years and after that it started going up and it's gone up and up and up and it's gone up and it's gone up way more under the conservatives and you can't see any democratic reason why he wouldn't keep going up to the absolute maximum until you get something like the mini budget where people finally realize oh actually you can't just completely go crazy with the public finances and not even pretend you're going to pay some of this money back. You've at least got to get the OBR and to pretend there's some sort of plan to bring in spending restraint at some point, which is what Jeremy Hansen done, even though he's going to keep borrowing more and more money, in actual fact, because he's going to leave the Labour Party to clear up the mess, and the democratic incentives are always to do that. Actually, they're always to borrow as much money as possible and then leave the next lot to clear up the mess. And it's kind of amazing that the conservatives in the 90s didn't do that. They actually, you know, reduce spending when they could have found all sorts of pet projects to spend the money on, and I guess the public quite liked that.
Speaker 2:Otherwise Blair wouldn't have made this pledge to stick to the spending limits. Blair could have said no, we're not going to stick to spending, we're going to spend more money on the NHS, but he actually didn't do that. After four years he did. Gordon Brown turned on the spending tap, but yet look, I think there is a real problem with four or five year parliaments in that people just want to get reelected and you get reelected by spending more money on things Is the?
Speaker 1:type of politician that predominates or dominates the challenge, because politics has become a career in a way that it wasn't. And is that part of the problem that before? I know you're not nostalgic about this and I think I agree with you on this, but before that it wasn't something you entered into to kind of make lots of money and go off and kind of become a consultant for the military industrial complex, whatever it might be Because now it's become a career.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's part of the problem. I think we have a very low grade of politician generally, but that's probably a reflection of the fact that we have low grade population. I mean, you watch Question Time, you get infuriated by why what the people on the panel are saying, and then you go to the audience and you go Christ we get the politicians we deserve, because the people in the audience are just absolute morons and you go okay.
Speaker 2:well, these are the people who are going to vote for the politicians. So the politicians have to say something stupid to appeal to the stupid people in the audience. You know, and I actually don't have that low opinion of the British public in general, the people who go Question Time audiences are just particularly bad, I think. But generally I think it's maybe controversial to say, but I think the standards of intelligence and responsibility amongst the people in general seems to have declined over the years and a lot of politicians you can look back on in the 60s and 70s they'd served in the war and stuff like that and they just seem much more grown up. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, I don't know. I think genuinely you would say that someone like Howard Wilsh and Winston Churchill or James Callahan these people had a certain amount of gravitas. Dennis Healy didn't have to agree with them. Margaret Thatcher obviously they just seem to, I don't know, just be grown ups in a way that the current batch on both sides are not.
Speaker 1:Is a source of optimism the reality that we're almost in a post-politics world where politicians can't really affect that much, From a negative sense. The institutions have been taken over by this kind of Gramski-esque movement. Take over the academia, the media, the civil service, and that's why successive conservatives have struggled to really do anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a blob theory.
Speaker 1:It's a blob theory, but actually the people who are really changing the world are not politicians, it's the entrepreneurs, it's the elons of this world that actually have. It's the entrepreneurs, the innovators that are going to make our lives better, and we need to. If you listen to the elons as well, they say look, we're not having enough kids. We all need to have more kids because we need to have more ideas to solve these things, versus the human race being a kind of cancer on the earth. That needs to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not convinced that the world hasn't got enough people. To be honest with you, I'm not one of these people who thinks that why should? What we need is another eight billion people. I think eight billion people are probably sufficient to cope with the problems we've got in the world, and you're right about the entrepreneurs being the ones who make the world better. Unfortunately, the entrepreneurs don't have the power to decide whether we build nuclear power stations or reservoirs or houses and all the things that actually politicians can do. And I think this blob excuse, although I do accept that there's a huge amount of resistance to meaningful change amongst the civil service and academics and so-called experts.
Speaker 1:I think it is an excuse.
Speaker 2:I fully expect over the next few years to see various autobiographies of various conservative party figures, ministers, ex ministers saying I wanted to do all this stuff. I tried so hard to do it. I couldn't get it past the civil service. I couldn't get it past.
Speaker 1:So Suella Bravin is a great example of that.
Speaker 2:You know somebody who was literally the Home Secretary, how you're one of the most powerful people in the country and while Home Secretary just going on these sort of GB New Style rants about why isn't the government doing this, why isn't the government doing that, well, yeah, if only you were in a position of power to do about it and she would go we can't do it because of this and that, and the lefty lawyers, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, look, yeah, there is resistance, sure, but if you literally can't do anything, we might as well give up. I mean, the conservative party might as well back up its tent and go home. I don't believe that's true. And one of the things I like about Dominic Cummings is he was prepared to take these forces on and to some extent he did. He did beat them. Never clear to me what he actually wanted to do, having sorted things out, but he was prepared to try and sort things out.
Speaker 2:So you can't tell me that in maybe 14 years, the conservative government, the conservatives, couldn't have really shaped things around them in order to, you know, do conservative things they could have done. They just haven't been looking at it strategically, they've been looking at a very short term. There's been four or five parameters that can't even keep count anymore. They've not been thinking long term about, and this is the problem. This is what I mean about the policy they don't think long term. It is absurd that we haven't built any nuclear power stations for 40 houses 30 or 40 years, or not enough houses.
Speaker 2:Certainly we haven't built any reservoirs for something like 30 years. I mean, the reservoirs are really quite a simple thing to build. You find a field, dig a hole. You know people aren't really going to object to it. They look quite nice. It's just a lake basically. So they haven't taken on the various vested interests of the NIMBs or the civil service. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:And actually I think the civil service get a lot of blame that should be apportioned to politicians. I think a lot of civil servants not all of them. I'm sure there are some ideogs in there, but a lot of them just want straightforward instructions that this is what we're trying to do. This is how we want to go about it, rather than constantly shifting selection and low grade ministers popping in and out the door with a completely different agenda.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, low grade ministers. Just to circle back to something you said earlier about the kind of the voting public or the public interested in politics, let's say it's sort of people don't go on question time, generally being weird, low caliber and getting the politicians they deserve. Are you, as a man of, kind of conscious of the use of statistics as a tool? How do you feel about IQ as a measure? I've got some views that I can share, but I'd love your thoughts.
Speaker 2:I've never looked into it that closely. I must admit. I'm not trying to weasel out and answering the question. I generally haven't looked into it very closely. I believe it correlates with all sorts of things, so I've clearly measured something of use. I don't know whether the average IQ of the country is going up or down, so it feels like it's going down to me. Is that the Flynn effect or isn't the reverse Flynn effect.
Speaker 1:There's a sense with IQ that all an IQ test tells you is how good you are at doing an IQ test. Yeah, that's what people always say that doesn't mean you should. Well, it does.
Speaker 2:All the driving test teachers who test is how good you are driving.
Speaker 1:It's very good at predicting people at the low end of the curve. So if you are genuinely if you're going to fail an IQ test miserably, you're probably going to fail in life quite badly, but for the rest it's just pretty meaningless.
Speaker 2:I've never taken the test of you? No, I have.
Speaker 1:If I've done really well. I think I'd be talking about how good this is.
Speaker 2:I'm too scared to take one in case.
Speaker 1:It's just something that I never kind of these sort of shapes and all this sort of stuff intuitively get, but I kind of I just see it as another example of people trying to distill very complex things into simple averages and then base policy around that with very high IQ.
Speaker 2:People can make huge mistakes. Yeah, experts and having a very blinked view of issues.
Speaker 1:So one more question for you before we wrap up what is a time zone activist?
Speaker 2:That was that's. That's my Twitter profile. I should explain folks. I have been running for some time a semi tongue-in-cheek campaign against, against moving the clocks back in October, because I genuinely think life gets worse as soon as it happens and it gets better when the clocks go forward in spring, and at the very least they should be going forward in February, not March. It makes no sense for them to change eight weeks before the shortest day and then change 13 weeks after. I think anyone could see that is insane. I accept that this time of year we're speaking in December it doesn't make a lot of difference having an extra hour in the evening. Fully accept that. Fully accept also that getting up you know, leaving, leaving the house at nine o'clock and it's still dark is pretty grim too, and I fully accept that you know, none of it works very well for people in Scotland.
Speaker 2:However, I will make the case that we're better off getting rid of GMT, just sticking to British Summertime All Year Round, for various different reasons, and I got invited onto a BBC politics show, or BBC Politics Southeast, to discuss this. I think I was sort of the light relief in the middle of the show and they weren't taking my campaign terribly seriously. In fact, it's not actually a campaign. I think they thought I was literally running a campaign because I used the hashtag not on my watch and the hashtag daylight robbery. They thought I was actually running a campaign and I was introduced as the Sussex man because there was a local element to this. I was the Sussex man who was refusing to change his clocks tomorrow as it was, and I had to point out I wasn't actually going to do that and that would make me a bit of a crackpot. I was keen to make clear I wasn't just some local crack, you weren't living an hour ahead of everyone else.
Speaker 1:You're late. No, you're all late.
Speaker 2:Well, at the end of it she signed off. The presenter signed off by saying we'll be back next Sunday at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock if you're Chris, which I thought was quite nice touch.
Speaker 2:That was good, so yeah. But the strap line when I appeared on the screen was Chris was no time zone activist, which is superb, so I've used that as my grace, my description. It used to be a year or two ago. It was former epidemiologists, now military strategist and energy analyst, and this was sort of a satirical attack on people on Twitter who think they're always experts about whatever come up. So we come out of COVID, hence epidemiologists, and the Ukraine war, hence military strategist and energy analyst.
Speaker 2:And I thought this was fairly obviously a joke, because that would be a very unusual career progression. Why would you give up epidemiology at all, get into military strategy? But I was then quoted in the Daily Mail this is actually brings both threads together because I put a tweet out saying before the mini budget the notorious mini budget saying that I've been hearing rumors in Westminster. Most of my fake tweets start with me saying I'm hearing rumors, hearing rumors in Westminster that quasi quarteng is going to scrap Greenwich. Meantime, I'm going to stick on British summertime all year round. And the Daily Mail immediately reported this as a news story. And not only that there was a rumor about this, but that this room had been reported on Twitter by Christopher Snowden, former epidemiologist military strategist and energy analyst.
Speaker 2:It then got picked up by the Sunday Times and the Scottish Sunday Times and one or two other newspapers. So journalists really are supposed to rely on at least two sources, not just take anything on Twitter from somebody who's clearly got a parody profile, but making the news.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's another example of that. That is a great story, by the way, that will stick with the rest of the day. But in the sports well, the sports journalism there's a very, very popular arsenal blog called Ask Blog, and they started, and their news, part of their news, part of their news website would be to, in the middle of their stories, put things like you know, wayne Rooney has three tits, or something like that, because they knew that journalists were just copy pasting their news and using it on the Guardian or the Telegraph Sports Section.
Speaker 1:So, just to kind of like catch them up because people are just so lazy. And I guess it goes back to our thing. We're talking about masks. First it's the experts say don't use masks and the experts say do you use masks? And then what really intrigued me about kind of human behavior was that people would have Twitter emojis, like there would be a picture of a mask and a needle to signify that you've been jadded, and a U flag and a Ukraine flag. And is this whole thing? Are we just really just to have them left the tribes, despite hundreds of years of scientific revolutions and enlightenment, thinking that we are just so tribal that this statistics is just there to enforce our tribalism rather than?
Speaker 2:free us from it. Oh, evidence is definitely used to, you know, like a drunk user's lamppost, more for a support and illumination, as they say. Yeah, I don't live under any kind of misapprention that anything I do makes a great deal of difference. You know, I can go out there and show such and such a thing, cite this evidence or something, and it will be picked up by people who basically agree with me, and what ammunition for their cause is very unlikely to actually change anyone's mind, I fear. Possibly younger people who haven't yet fixed on their, you know, decided exactly what they believe. But you know I don't believe in evidence based policy. I'm actually much more cynical about this than I've ever been, and I started out fairly cynical about it.
Speaker 2:I don't think there's such a thing as evidence based policy really. I think that it's all money and power and vanity. Pretty much Evans doesn't really change anything. I've been doing what I do for long enough to see campaigns go from sort of an idea to policy to you can actually see what happened in the real world and they just don't work. But nobody ever turns around and admits it. Minimum pricing for alcohol clearly didn't work. They had a sunset clause it was supposed to go if it didn't work. Alcohol rate deaths in Scotland are now 10% higher than they were before minimum pricing. But they just put out a modeling study saying actually they've fallen by 13%. And you had someone on the BBC in Scotland standing in front of this graph showing alcohol rate deaths going up year on year and looking down the camera and saying alcohol rate deaths have fallen by 13% and he's like this is just Orwellian in the, you know I can see the deaths going up and you're telling me they've fallen by 13%, while coming to a model.
Speaker 2:Sugar tax didn't work. Again. They came up with a model saying it kind of did sort of for one subgroup of girls. They can get away with anything. Really, I mean, they're kind of untouchable, these people. And it's not just public health. I suspect public health is just the area I know a bit about.
Speaker 1:Policy is not based on evidence Foreign policy, military policy, you know, as you've heard. But so the and you've noticed this earlier in terms of, you know, the five year election cycle there's, the feedback loop is too extended for people to feel the. There's no skin in the game. People don't feel the consequence of their bad decisions, no matter the impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the the issues I write about, to be honest, even though they're in the news a lot, they're really quite low salience issues for a lot of people that just don't care. And you know, if iron brew gets reformulated with less sugar and it tastes horrible, that's kind of annoying to people like iron brew, but it doesn't make a lot difference to anybody else Smoking. You know, we haven't really talked about this ludicrous prohibition idea of Rishi Sunax, which originally came from Jacinda R Derns. This is a classic example, I think, of. So what's the? What's the policy? Well, the no one born before 2000,. Sorry, no one born after 2008 will ever be able to buy tobacco products, all tobacco products, including heated tobacco and pipe tobacco and snuff, because there's no many kids love snuff. There's a huge snuff epidemic in this country. And Rizla, you can't, won't be able to buy cigarette papers, which is hilarious.
Speaker 2:The government's going to progressively ban pieces of paper from being sold and the announcers at the Tory conference, in a speech that was all about how he is thinking about the long term interests of the country. If you remember, all right, it was like the last 30 years, all my predecessors have been short termists, but I'm thinking about the long term future of the country. So I'm going to scrap most HS2. I'm going to ban people from smoking gradually and buying paper, but only from 2027. Right, the first 18 year olds will turn. The first people affected by it will turn 1820 to 27. So he almost certainly won't be in office. Even if he was, this thing isn't going to really have a major negative effects in terms of the very predictable effects of prohibition Not going to have any effects for several years.
Speaker 2:Let's put it that way it's the most short term thing you can do, in a way, because he's just announcing this thing. He's not going to be around to see the repercussions of it, he's just getting some good headlines. Didn't get a bump in the polls, by the way. Apparently it polled really well as an individual policy. It made no difference to the overall polls. Soon acts now the least popular person in his own government, according to the views of Tory members, which again is a low salience issue. People might go yeah, I don't like smoking. All people here.
Speaker 2:I think when the government says we're going to stop people who are 14 years old from ever smoking, they just hear the word 14 year olds, they go well, yeah, I don't think 14 year olds spoke. Yeah, they don't really take the fairly short leap of imagination to go well, they're going to be 24 and 10 years old and then they're going to be 34 and 20 years old and maybe actually they should have the right to buy cigarette papers. So to me it was just classic political pygmy, these little men. I don't mean I'm going to go at its height, but I mean, I mean intellectually a little man coming up with this pathetic, ludicrous idea. Really, it seems every time politicians want to create some kind of legacy for themselves, they're saying, oh, let's give smokers another kicking. I haven't given smokers a kicking for a while. Yeah, blair introduced a smoking ban, left office four days before it began. I never thought that was a coincidence. I thought he thought it was a good chance that a lot of people in pubs are just going to go well.
Speaker 2:I'm going to carry on smoking. Never happened because of the way they enforced it, but I was his legacy. Really, I don't want my legacy to be Iraq war. I want my legacy to be this big thing that people notice, which a lot of people can be in favor of Theresa May. She introduced his 2030 target for Britain, going smoke three, never asked smokers about it, but decided by 2030, we're going to be smoke three. So, yeah, it just seems. Again, it really comes back to this, my point, which is that we have very, very one dimensional, shallow politicians and the things that these people are interested in, like let's stop people smoking, let's stop people driving petrol cars these are the things that really seem to interest them for some reason, and the things that really matter, like building houses and keeping the lights on they don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I suspect it's a function of you know we're in enough. Position of affluence.
Speaker 2:Well, we think we are. But I mean, are we? I mean, we're living off, we're living off the past. He's a kind of luxury beliefs, aren't they? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:The people who've got time. That's right. Take it if you need to.
Speaker 2:No no, no, the luxury beliefs exactly for people in a privileged position, and so the things they think about is like, ooh, there's too many fat people who need to sort it, and the thing is that they'll pick things that they can't really even tackle properly anyway. The government can't stop people getting fat. There's nothing the government can do other than bringing about rationing perhaps there's gonna stop people being fat. There's nothing they can do about the climate. You know, there's nothing, a British politician. No matter what they do, they're not gonna have any effects on the climate, but they have these, despite being, you know, really very often quite inadequate people. They have these incredibly messy ethnic agendas, like it's a worst of both worlds.
Speaker 2:You've got people who can't deal with actually fairly straightforward problems.
Speaker 1:Trying to deal with incredibly complex and almost impossible problems, unless someone needs to tell Rich if you wanna win the next election, make it easier for young people to buy a house. Make the hospitals work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but even if he agreed with that, he can't do anything. The timeframe he's got, so why is he gonna bother?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, let's actually before I ask my final question. Actually, I'll ask the final question because it might enable you to bring a bit of positivity into this.
Speaker 2:No chance.
Speaker 1:No chance? Okay, well, let's see. But I'd like to. As you know, I like to end these conversations with something I call the long bet, where you have a 10 year timeframe. And now, why 10 years? Not nine or 11 or five, I think, because it's sufficiently far away enough to be meaningful, but it's not so far away that you couldn't be called up. If we do this podcast again in three or four years, I might go Chris, how's that bet coming along? But there's something that you know having trashed forecasters and predictors, you know myself most of my last two or three years of my adult life. I just do this as a bit of fun, because it enables people to kind of scratch that forecasting edge without too many consequences.
Speaker 1:But something that you think will happen over the next 10 years, or something that you would like to happen over the next 10 years, and if it's the latter also such as well piece or to be discouraged.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean you can't hold me up on it in 10 years time. It was just something I'd like to happen. So I'll say something I think will happen. It goes back to what I was just talking about. I think that cigarettes certainly, and probably ultra back products, will be completely illegal in this country in 10 years time. I think that, assuming the government goes through this generational ban, it will very quickly be seen to be absurd. I mean that'll mean 20 years time. I mean straight away, like when you've got like second year students can buy cigarettes, but first year students can't. It's gonna be ridiculous.
Speaker 2:And the first people's point of how ridiculous this is will be the people who proposed it in the first place, which is to say the anti-smoking groups, and they will say what we need here, you know, because it's daft, isn't it? You got people. They're all adults. Some of them can't smoke, some can. Let's have a level playing field. Let's just stop everybody smoking. And what the government will do is it will maybe dish out free vape, so that's quite possible that vaping will be pulled into this prohibition by then anyway. But it will certainly say, right January, the first 2032, whatever it is, that's it for smoking.
Speaker 2:So, you've got a year to give up. Here's what we recommend. We're gonna put money into smoking cessation services which don't work.
Speaker 1:Can I ask you about January, the second then? Because you know people will watch apparently smoking in Hollywood's on the rise now, but like people will go off to Calais and notice the French kids having a pun on them and go what is this place? I'm not saying it's gonna work, yeah, but the levels of smoking, will you know, may go up as a result.
Speaker 2:Yeah, may well go up. I mean it'd be a disaster. You know, we actually might get to a kind of disaster stage even before that. Actually just from the sheer price of tobacco. Price of tobacco is rocketed recently. Rolling tobacco, which is the most smuggled type of tobacco by far. Even by the government's own statistics, 40% of rolling tobacco is smuggled in and I think those statistics are almost certainly a bit optimistic.
Speaker 2:The tax on rolling tobacco went up by inflation plus 6% in March. Inflation about 10% then, so quite a hike. And then it's just gone up in the last few weeks by inflation which is 8% plus 12%. So in the space of a year the tax on rolling tobacco has gone by about 30%, 40%, Nearly 40%, and it's gonna keep on going up and up and up because the government just can't seem to stop itself. So you'll end up with, in a fairly short space of time, a really big black market.
Speaker 2:And we've already got one, but we don't know how big it is. We'll end up with most tobacco being sold on the black market In Australia right now, where they have the highest cigarette taxes in the world. They have got what the media routinely casually describes as tobacco turf wars. The gangsters are using what they call earnest or burnish earn or burn system in which if you don't stock their black market cigarettes, they burn your shop down. Been more than 30 fire bombings in the last few months. Down there there's murders, endemic smuggling, endemic tobacco farming, illegal tobacco farming. Big country Australia. You can get away with growing a lot of tobacco without anybody noticing, and that's without prohibition. That's just high taxes. So this is coming down the road. I absolutely believe we'll have full prohibition and we'll have to live through it 100 years after the Americans did with booze before maybe people come to their senses. Well, here's a counter prediction 2023,.
Speaker 1:the state and its various apparatus will go look, it's just not our job to tell people how they live their lives. The responsibility of people's actions lie with them. They should be allowed to make the mistakes and learn from their mistakes, but it's not our job to deal with.
Speaker 2:This is gonna be on the prime minister, far out, look, I don't know.
Speaker 1:How does that? Is it possible for that counter prediction to come? What bugs me is let people make mistakes. It's not your job to stop people as long as they're not impacting other people. If you're a considerate, if you get boozed up and you beat people up, then you should go to lock up. Or if society will tell you very quickly to stop blowing smoke into people's faces and they're like it, whatever it might be. But let your God and your parents and your school teacher decide or help you manage your risks and help you stop you making certain mistakes. How do we get there, rather than the government doing that instead? Is it possible?
Speaker 2:It's possible. I mean, things will swing back eventually. Even the Soviet Union fell eventually. This is a less repressive regime than that, so I think eventually.
Speaker 1:But it's just funny, the first thing that ISIS did when they would sweep into a territory would be burn all the flags. Yeah, They'd gather all the secrets. It's like before the books they'd burn the secrets. There's something about that, symbolically, that stuck with me. But why is this kind of fanatic death cult?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And when ISIS would driven out, then the first thing people would do would light a cigarette. Interesting Tortures of freedom. So yeah, that is Rishi's immediate predecessor in the world of tobacco prohibition the Islamic State.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, on that note, I just would love to say thank you very much. People can find you at CJ Snowden on.
Speaker 2:Twitter Anywhere else, facebook, instagram. I am on Instagram, but I treat it with the content it deserves.
Speaker 1:Far enough, so let's dig to.
Speaker 2:Or X the platform, fk, no just keep calling it Twitter, keep calling it, twitter, just keep calling it. I still call Snickers Marathons. I can easily keep calling Twitter, twitter.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, we can find Chris on Marathon at CJ Snowden. Thank you so much for the real pleasure. Appreciate the time and let's do it again soon. That's it. We'll see you next time, thank you.