Do people just give up?
The Guardian is reporting this morning that “there were 32,300 fewer people receiving jobseeker’s allowance in February than in the previous month [...] The wider Labour Force survey measure, which also includes people out of work who are not claiming benefits, also fell, by 33,000 in the three months to January to 2.45 million, the biggest drop since July 2007.”
So far, so good.
However, further down in the same article, it is pointed out that “employment is down 54,000 to 28.86 million, the lowest level since 2006. A record 8.16 million people are now classed as economically inactive, which includes students, people on long-term sick leave and those who have given up looking for a job.”
So this really is not good news. Unemployment is down because people are not looking for jobs, not because more people are working.
It would have been useful to see figures for underemployment, too – other surveys have recently pointed out that more and more people are forced into part-time jobs.
What it looks like is that the regular jobs are disappearing. Some people get part-time jobs instead, but others move back to their home country, retrain (which means they’re counted as students), take early retirement, or just give up.
Rotated maps
Some years ago, a colleague of mine from Cartographic gave me a wonderful map: It showed Scotland and Ireland, but rotated so that Scotland was straight above Ireland, and with all place names in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
I’m not sure why, but the usual way of displaying Ireland next to England makes me feel Ireland is far away from Scotland, when they really are very close together.
The map sadly got lost when I moved from Mavisbank Gardens to Rose Street, but I’ve tried to recreate the effect here, although I’ve arranged the two countries horizontally instead of vertically:
Feel free to tell me that everything looks entirely normal to you.
If you’re anything like me, however, you will be amazed how some places (such as Belfast or Islay) suddenly look like they’re central rather than on the periphery.
Selling books on Amazon
I own far too many books, so as an experiment, I decided to try and sell a few on Amazon to see whether it’s worth my while.
I put six books up for sale – fiction and non-fiction, hardbacks and paperbacks – a couple of weeks ago, but although I agreed to sell them at very low prices, I didn’t sell the first one till three days ago.
It was a paperback, and the price was £1.69.
However, that’s only vaguely related to what Amazon are paying me:
Buyer’s Price: £1.69
Shipping: £2.75
Amazon Fees: £-1.64
Your Earnings: £2.80
Envelope: £-0.33
Postage: £-1.04
Grand Profit: £1.43
Note how Amazon’s fee is almost exactly the exactly the selling price, so my profit is basically the difference between the fixed shipping fee and the actual cost.
Given that it must have taken me at least ten minutes to list the book on Amazon, print out the receipt, wrap the book and go to the post office, there really are better ways to make money.
So how do I get rid of a thousand books more easily and/or profitably?
iScroll?
The problem with tablet computers is that they’re too big and too light at the same time: Too big to fit into a soft and safe pocket, and too light to make a hard case feasible.
So products like the iPad will probably break all the time unless people put them into big cases, in which case they might as well have bought a notebook.
So I started wondering whether the solution would be to roll up the computer instead, and my father-in-law has now sent me a video that shows that I wasn’t the first person with this idea:
It looks like a great idea, although I’m wondering whether the outer casing won’t scratch the screen when it’s rolled up — I would have thought it needed to be soft on the outside. I also wonder whether it needs to be so big. An iPad rolled up wouldn’t be much bigger than an banana, I reckon, so it would fit into a jacket pocket or a lady’s handbag.
Sadly, however, this is just a design project AFAIK, not an actual product.
But perhaps somebody will make an actual product out of this one day. If it’s Apple, they could call it the iScroll.
Coalition stability and the UK
More and more people are pointing out that coalitions can lead to stable and successful governments, at least in continental Europe, the point being that one shouldn’t fear the so-called “hung parliament” that so many supporters of the two big parties dread.
I agree, and I actually think that it would be much better for the UK instead of the adversarial two-party politics that Westminster is focused on.
However, discussing coalitions, Fraser Nelson was worrying that “if everyone thinks they’re one year away from a new election how popular are cuts going to be”.
I think this is exactly why coalitions have worked badly in the UK in the past.
In countries where coalitions are successful, it’s also the case that they have fixed-term parliaments and/or an electoral system that means that there is no hope for any one party to get a majority.
In other words, in many countries the parties know that they have to make coalition a success, because they have no alternative.
Sadly, however, if no single party gets a majority after this year’s general election, it’s likely they’ll only treat coalition as a way to prepare for the following general election, which will happen as soon as the PM of the day thinks that he can get a majority by calling an election.
The consequence of this is that the LibDems shouldn’t hope for four years of influence. At the most, they’ll be influential for a year, so they’ll have to make the most of it, especially by changing the electoral system.
The inevitable election date
The media today agree it is now inevitable that the general election will take place on 6 May.
I’m not convinced.
It could well be that Brown thinks he’s going to go for the 6th, but when he has to make the announcement in April, he’ll check the opinion polls, and what will the Great Ditherer do if they’re going against him again? Go for the planned date or postpone it for another month in the hope that things will be better then?
I have put good money on a June election, and all the budget date has told me is that the election won’t take place in March or early April.
The six regions of the US
When I was 15, my parents went to Chicago and brought me back two books: Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Both books have been important to me.
The former was for many years my favourite book, and if I hadn’t read it, I might have been much worse at English (I had already stopped doing English at school, and it was only because I wanted to read Douglas Adams in the original language that it didn’t slowly get worse, but that’s really a separate blog posting).
The latter is a fine cookbook, but it’s actually been more important to me because it taught me not to regard the US a one homogeneous country.
It has divided the US into six regions: New England, the South, the Heartland, Louisiana, the Southwest and the Pacific States, and the food in each part is clearly quite distinctive.
I have often in the years since then used these regions to understand American issues, and most often than not it has helped my understanding of them.
A better way to elect the UK parliament
When people in the UK discuss alternatives to the current electoral system used for Westminster (first-past-the-post), they tend to look towards Ireland, Australia or possibly Germany, but never Scandinavia.
However, the system used there has many advantages, and indeed people there just take it for granted, so it must have got something right!
To make the Danish electoral system tangible, I have therefore made a simulation of the UK General Election 2005 according to the Danish system. (It’s quite long, so feel free to skip down to the results instead of reading all the details.)
Here are some of the advantages of the Danish system:
- Every vote counts. Even if your vote doesn’t get anybody elected where you live, it will count towards your party elsewhere in the country. This combats the way parties under FPTP tend to concentrate all their efforts on swing voters in marginal seats.
- The politicians need to get themselves elected, not just their party. A politician will typically be up against at least ten other candidates from their own party, and it is therefore important to have a personal agenda, not just to toe the party line.
- Need to be positive. When all votes count, if party A claims party B are evil, it might benefit party C or D just as easily as party A. So instead, party A needs to give the voters reasons to vote for them.
- It preserves some sort of constituency link. Given that it’s still the constituencies that put up candidates, and given that MPs are elected in small groups of constituencies, there is still a very strong local link, and it’s easy to understand how to get rid of a bad MP.
- Results are available quickly. Like FPTP, but unlike STV, results come in quickly, thus providing for a good election night experience.
- Opinion polls are right. Under FPTP, there is no simple correlation between share of the vote and number of seats won, so a party can lose votes but gain seats and vice versa. Under the Danish system, more votes leads to more seats, and opinion polls will therefore accurately predict how many MPs each party will get.
- Parties become truly national. Under FPTP, most parties tend to get most of their MPs elected in specific geographical areas (LibDems in the South West, Labour in the cities, the Tories in rural England). The Danish system spreads out the MPs more evenly, so that the LibDems will get fewer seats in the South West but more in the cities and rural England, Labour will get fewer seats in the cities but more elsewhere, etc. (This is not taken to extremes. The SNP only gets seats in Scotland – it’s not artificially extended to England.)