ASI Bulletin: AI-tlas Shrugged, Champagne and Socialism.
Dr. Eamonn Butler, our Director and Co-Founder, takes you through the last few (always busy) weeks at the Adam Smith Institute.
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In this bulletin:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Well, I guess the UK can’t afford the real thing.
PARTY CONFERENCES: We chip in on Labour winning, wood burning and migrants
But first...
I see that Radio 4’s Book of the Week last week was Jessie Norman’s book on Adam Smith: What he thought and why it matters. (Well, at least they twigged it was Smith’s 300th birthday year, even if they twigged it two months after the actual date.)
Parliamentarians have been surprised to discover a Chinese spy among their staff. (Though I don’t know why they’re surprised, since Chinese spies are all over the place.)
Labour has been making policy announcements, including surprises like they’re not going to put up taxes (Why bother, when the Tories have already done that for them) and non-surprises like they’re going to give trades unions much more power to strike (as if they don’t have enough already!). Nobody, though, is promising to scrap the triple lock on pensions (so at £407 a week for a couple with full contributions, that means the wealthiest pensioners can still afford a daily bottle of Moet and an ounce of caviar without actually getting any poorer).
Liz Truss has a new book out which is entitled Ten Years to Save the West. (I would say she should have published that about a decade ago, too late now.) And a prisoner escaped from Wandsworth by strapping himself under a delivery lorry. (Good job he didn’t try to escape in a cement truck, or he might have become a hardened criminal?—Ed.)
The Tories, though, won’t be able to escape their Manchester love-in so easily, given the rail strikes cunningly planned at the end of it (Well, they’re the ones saying they won’t build a High Speed Rail link to Manchester, so they’re getting what they wanted).
But I digress…
Events
We’re hosting a cinema screening of the classic 1942 movie We the Living, directed by Goffredo Alessandrini on Friday 26th October. It’s based on the 1936 political love-triangle novel by Ayn Rand and stars nobody you’ve ever heard of, but it should be a fun evening in an old-school cinema and post-screening cocktails. We’re hosting this with our friends from the Ayn Rand Centre Europe, and we’re getting Duncan Scott, producer of the film, over from the US of A to speak. Save the date and sign up here for further details!
Our next ten-minute speaker at the monthly meeting of The Next Generation—young movers and shakers from Westminster and the world— is Bim Afolami MP, former national athletics champion and now Member of Parliament for Hitchin and Harpenden. He is Chair of the parliamentary groups on renewable energy and on credit unions, and was as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liz Truss, and Vice Chair of the Conservative Party until he resigned in the light of partygate (or more broadly, ‘Borisgate' perhaps). His talk will be titled, ‘how to embrace youth voters and win a fifth term’. Ambitious. 6pm on Tuesday 10 October. Don’t send us an email — we’ve moved to some super-duper booking system that I don’t understand. If you’re under 35, click here to RSVP.
And don’t say we don’t engage with alternative thinking! Our very own James Price is a guest speaker at the Socialist Alternatives Festival in Liverpool on the 11th November. He’ll be defending capitalism.
Essay Competition
We have extended the deadline of our Ayn Rand Essay Competition to November 1st 2023. Simply write between 800 and 1000 words about ‘How Ayn Rand’s work and thought shaped our cities’, and be in with the chance of winning £500 and a box of books [first place], or a two week internship at the Institute and £250 [second place].
To enter, please email maxwell@adamsmith.org.
Party Conference Events
Labour’s agenda. We’re reformatting an event we did at the Labour Party Conference two years ago, which had Katy Balls, Stephen Bush, and Ben Guerin speak on a panel entitled 'So you think you're going to win'. This time, it will be another panel on a similar theme, entitled 'Growing into Power?'. We have already confirmed Rachel Cunliffe from the New Statesman and Hugo Gye from iNews. Do come along, we’ll be in The Lounge in the ACC on Sunday 8th October, 16:00 - 17:00.
Conservative conference. With the train strikes, it looks like we’ll be walking to this one. Our policy director Maxwell Marlow is on two panels at the Conservative Party conference. The first asks whether burning biomass for electricity is a waste of money or whether technology can revolutionise it (Tuesday 3 October, 11am in Central Rooms 3-4 at the Manchester Convention Complex. The next is a debate between various think tanks on the benefits and costs of migration and what UK policy on it should be (in the Think Tent at 17.45 on Monday 2 October). Our Director of Comms, Emily Fielder, will also be speaking on the TaxPayers’ Alliance panel ‘Blue with envy: Have the Tories turned their back on success?’ See you there on Tuesday 3rd October from 2pm-3pm in the Think Tent.
New Research
Artificial intelligence. Here at the ASI we have plenty of the real thing, but we thought we should produce a report looking at how we should deal with the artificial stuff. We suggest keeping AI away from WMDs and critical infrastructure, but do our best to boost it in our governance, research, productivity, and medicine. Give it a read, both in The Telegraph and on our website.
On the super-blog….
Madsen Pirie is skeptical of the mini-Budget mandate to the Treasury, and to Revenue & Customs, to focus on simplifying the tax code. That’s meaningless unless you have a dedicated team to do it, he says, and those two just aren’t the folk for the job. It needs radical ideas: merging income tax and national insurance, for instance, reducing the number of tax rates and thresholds--and more. But the last thing that civil servants want is taxes so simple that you can understand just how much of it is being squeezed out of you. Read it here.
The Financial Times writes: “Big government is back. How will we pay for it?" To which Tim Worstall replies: How about not having big government, so that we don’t have to. As P J O’Rourke noted in his ‘principles of circumcision’, you can take 10% off anything. But times are tough, and we really need to take 20% off our bloated state. And UK citizens don’t actually want a bigger state anyway—or they would be pushing forward to pay more for it. Which they ain’t.
Media
Speaking of the Financial Times, one of the members of the Chancellor’s Economic Advisory Council wrote a piece of them which suggests we should tax inflation- a wage cap by any other name. Here’s our President Madsen Pirie in the Telegraph on why it’s an economically nonsensical proposal.
And our team have been placing opinion pieces elsewhere. James Price was in CapX railing against the Online Safety Bill, as was I on the cybersecurity threat from China, and Emily Fielder was in CityAM on why we shouldn’t have tax cuts for only the over 50s- as some have suggested.
Elsewhere, journalists and commentators have been seeking Maxwell Marlow’s opinion on a range of policy topics. He’s been in Politics Home here on the Digital Currency, in Guido Fawkes and CityAm on the ban on disposable vapes, and in the I on how we can reform the state pension. Likewise, he has come up with new, novel solutions to the environmental problems of disposable vapes in CapX (without banning them!).
Our co-founder Madsen Pirie spoke to Alibhe Rea from Politico on an upcoming podcast episode of ‘Westminster Insider’. Reflecting on the ASI from ‘just two men and their dog minus the dog’ to the office as we sit in it today, it’s a good ‘un. Should be out Friday.
Maxwell also attended the Greenwich Learning and Simulation Centre (GLASC) VIP Immersive Simulation Event, which demonstrated innovative ways of changing healthcare to be more patient focused. There are huge opportunities from this — if only our decrepit NHS was likely to invest in it.
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And I quote…
With the party conferences coming up, I couldn’t resist this from Adam Smith:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices?
A lot of people, by the way, see this as Adam Smith saying what bad people tradespeople are — and indeed, he was under no illusions about their motives. But if you read the next few paragraphs in The Wealth of Nations, you see him explaining what it is that makes these conspiratorial meetings more likely. And the answer is all sorts of regulations that government impose on business, which they have to meet to discuss and set up systems for. So the answer is not more regulation, but less!
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