London Calling

"London calling to the underworld’ Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls" (The Clash)


So it has taken me a while to mull this over but it was inevitable that there would be a comment on the recent England riots.

Firstly it is not that unusual for the odd bit of rioting in England, there were the Brixton riots, Poll tax riots, student riots and a couple of others besides, it seems that in England the odd riot is merely part of the democratic process. Wide scale looting on the other hand seems to be a different thing and it is this bit that seems to have lead to all the name calling and hand wringing amongst the ruling classes.

So what caused this is what I have been trying to decide. I am probably too far away to truly understand what is going on but that won’t stop me trying.

The first obvious point is that it is the poor that are rioting, but there is nothing much to be learned from that, it is always the peasants causing trouble, the gentry like things the way they are because by definition the system works for them. (not least because they are likely to have had a hand in designing the system) But mostly the poor don’t riot so why are they so grumpy now. Well first a seemingly irrelevant aside.

Every now and then World Vision or some such organisation appears on my television asking me to give them money to feed the people in some place I can’t place on a map (unless you count pointing to an entire continent) because they are suffering from famine. While at a human level the pictures and plight of these people can be distressing I have never been a fan of giving money to feed these folk and here is why.

Any given environment can support a certain number of creatures, this works for fish in a pond and humans in a given area, when the food supply is plentiful the population expands and when there is a natural crash in the food supply the population contracts, again the same for all creatures including people. One of the biggest influences in food supply is weather, good vs bad growing seasons. If you looked at this phenomenon over time you would be able to see that on average a pond can support an average of 10 fish (say) and if the population was restricted to 10 then there would be no boom and bust, especially if you can carry over the surplus from the good seasons to support yourself in the bad seasons, something people have learned to do in any number of ways.

So what happens when you support people through the bust cycle by giving them food? Well you prevent the bust which presumably leads to an even greater population (because some of the breeding stock is not killed off) thereby putting more pressure on the environment increasing the frequency of bad periods (because some of the marginal seasons become bad due to increased population) and so if that cycle continues you just have a continuous famine period because the population exceeds the environments ability to maintain it.

All very interesting but how does this apply to London? Well it shows that sometimes doing a seemingly good thing and a humane thing can sometimes be detrimental and potentially lead to even more suffering in the long term (everyone always in famine conditions) In the case of England potentially this is the welfare system in action.

Welfare is the equivalent of feeding famine victims in the bad years and it masks the signals that might otherwise be sent. For examples having babies that you can’t feed without any intervention would lead to dead babies (yes a very bad thing it is just an example) but it might also stop you having more babies, however with Welfare, no dead babies and less pressure on having more babies therefore a bigger problem. Another example, there is a lot of immigration into England presumably for a lot of different reasons but one reason will be to improve the economic lot of some of the immigrants, however if there were a lot of people starving on the street because there were no jobs this might make some of them not immigrate again less pressure on the environment.

So to be clear I am not blaming the riots on babies or immigrants, my suggestion is that maybe we have reached some sort of welfare induced tipping point where a section of society is in famine all of the time and we got there through a welfare system that is humane but misguided. This has become a problem right now because the total environment (England) has run out of resources (Austerity Britain) and the food supply is drying up. When there are too many fish in the pond even the big fish get unhappy.

The bigger problem for me is that I don’t think England has this problem to itself.