Category: Art

Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics.

1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average unskilled worker? I mean, both got a bare subsistence living and neither had political rights. But slaves had more job security. So how bad was slavery compared to free labour?

I know the passage from Africa was horrific, and there are examples of terrible mistreatment of both slaves and workers. But I’m asking about averages. Anecdotes aren’t enough. And don’t give me any nonsensical effort to empathise from today’s perspective.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence – the pictures of beaten slaves and of (free) children pulling heavy carts through narrow mineshafts – that life for most people in the 1700s was not pleasant. That, however, doesn’t answer Chris’s question. To do that, we’d need detailed breakdowns of the socioeconomic situation of the various types and classes of people at the time. They are not, so far as I know, available.

However, slavery was not just an economic condition. It is very much tied in to race and religion; the question of whether non-whites even had souls was prevalent. While the economics of the situation are worth studying, the moral justifications that were deployed and the attempt to keep slavery out of sight and out of mind are worth studying too; after all, “one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.”¹

In any case, the eighteenth century was one of great change that saw the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions and the move from the countryside to the city. I would add that, although villeinage had disappeared in England by 1700, villeins existed in Scotland until 1799.

2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?

Actually, NGS doesn’t want to do that or, at least, if they do they haven’t told anyone. I telephoned the NGS’s contact for the Sutherland purchase and they have not announced how they propose to fund it. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they want to take it out of general taxation.

Using QALYs would, in time, almost by definition suggest that the spending is justified. It is a one-off purchase of two paintings that will also secure a long-term loan on a further fourteen pieces of art. If we say that, on a scale of one to zero, one is perfect health while zero is dead, we can give a figure to the change in QALYs from the expenditure.
I quote from the entry on NICE’s website on QALYs:

Patient x has a serious, life-threatening condition.

If he continues receiving standard treatment he will live for 1 year and his quality of life will be 0.4 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If he receives the new drug he will live for 1 year 3 months (1.25 years), with a quality of life of 0.6.

The new treatment is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: 1 (year’s extra life) x 0.4 = 0.4 QALY

New treatment: 1.25 (1 year, 3 months extra life) x 0.6 = 0.75 QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to 0.35 additional QALYs (that is: 0.75 –0.4 QALY = 0.35 QALYs).

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £10,000, standard treatment costs £3000.

The difference in treatment costs (£7000) is divided by the QALYs gained (0.35) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £20,000 per QALY.

Let me substitute a little.

Person y has a serious, life-threatening condition; they are alive and therefore will die in n years.

If they continue receiving standard treatment they will live for n years and his quality of life will be m, where 0? m ? 1 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If they receive the new drug they will live for n years (assuming that art doesn’t affect length of life), with a quality of life of m + b, where b is the benefit in terms of quality of life derived from viewing the art

The new treatment, art, is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: n x m = nm QALY

New treatment: n x (m+b) = nm+nb QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to nb additional QALYs

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £50,000,000, inaction costs £0.

The difference in treatment costs (£50,000,000) is divided by the QALYs gained (nb) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £50,000,000/nb per QALY.

Let us say that a nice trip to the gallery to see the picture is equal to a positive change of one one-thousandth, or 0.001. We very quickly see that the cost, given that n is constant, per QALY is an astronomical number: 50000000000. That, however, is for one person. To bring it down to the £30,000 limit suggested by the NHS, 1,666,667 people would have to see the paintings. That’s not per year; that’s in total ever. NGS tell me that one and a half million people visit the National Galleries of Scotland per year, a million of which go to the National Gallery of Scotland where the Titian is.

It may be that my assumption of one one-thousandth of a QALY is too high. It wouldn’t matter; you’d have to wait longer to derive the benefit, but it would happen. It is also, of course, possible that it is too low. Not everyone who sees the paintings (the total is fourteen) is going to be someone off the street. Some will be schoolchildren on guided tours who may have a lifelong interest sparked in art; I’m sure you can think of other, equally unquantifiable examples.

You could also add into the calculation the benefit of the continuation of these major works of art to the local economy, including the increased publicity they will receive from the coverage of the possible purchase.

I wonder if Chris has been reading Bentham; the QALY method is the descendant of the felicific calculus and I’m sure that he would like to think he’s had an impact. The reason, I suspect, that this form of CBA is only applied to medical treatments for two reasons. Firstly, medical types tend to have a decent grasp of statistics and so are more likely to come up with ways of quantifying abstracts like ‘quality of life’. Doing the same thing for, say, Trident would be a lot harder as you have to make unprovable, untestable assumptions about the effect of having nuclear weapons. You could say that having a bell on a stick would prevent us from being nuked and it would be just as hard to prove. It is also hard to test the effect, if any, of things like prestige. I suspect, though, that the main reason is that the budgets for the NHS in general and medicines in particular are so large that they cannot be ignored and that, as the Government wanted to move responsibility away from itself, both to avoid the demands of political exigence and thereby to give a fairer result, NICE was set up and went about things in the best way it could.

3. How can academics be so quick to close down free speech? Surely, any proper teacher must know that the solution to mistaken beliefs is to correct them through discussion – that’s what teaching means. Academics must therefore support free speech, by definition. Does this episode merely corroborate my prejudice, that a close interest in the Israel-Palestine question is dangerous for one’s mental health?

Unfortunately, there are plenty of academics who don’t sign up to the scientific method; I point to many of the people involved in promoting creationism or intelligent design and, for some excellent rebuttal, Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel.

Mistaken beliefs should, in theory, be correctable by teaching so long as the belief is honestly held on a misappreciation of facts or misapplication of argument. Often, the aim is not to find any sort of ‘truth’ or answer but to ensure that your side wins; the fervour behind that aim, whether religious or secular, is such that any methods are justified leading to a lack of understanding in why what can be broadly termed the scientific method is important. That leads to lazy citation and research and quoting David Duke.

In answer to the final point, yes. I agree with much of Dave Osler’s thinking about the problems around discussing the area at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean.

4. Companies are moving their head offices to Ireland or Luxembourg to save tax. So, is there something to be said for a cut in corporation tax, financed by higher top income tax rates? The idea here is that companies’ head offices are more mobile than individual high-earners, and it doesn’t matter much anyway if a few of these leave or retire anyway. So we protect tax revenues without increasing inequality. What’s wrong with this?

In a unitary state, not much. However, in a country like the USA, where a slight rise in corporation tax could allow for a reduction in income tax in a given state, making people move to a state next to the state where they work. Indeed, it could make sense for a state to try to ride the Laffer curve if they have a nearby headquarters. Ultimately, it depends on whether the costs of moving justify the rewards of lower taxes for a given high-earner.

As to what might be wrong with this, we well know that the majority of the press will not report such subtleties other than as ‘tax rise’ or an attack on anything resembling progressive taxation.

I have wondered what would happen if we scrapped all taxes except income tax, adjusting the total take accordingly; I suspect, though, that whatever we did companies and other states would play the system to their advantage.

5. Merrill Lynch has lost a quarter of the profits it made in 36 years in just 18 months. Does this show that the profits to investment banking are a reward for taking black swan risk? You make decent profits, on average, in exchange for massive losses on rare occasions? Were Merrill’s profits (and those of other investment bankers) in good times merely a reward for taking this obscure risk? Did they – and their rivals – really fully understand what they were doing, or were they just lucky punters? What would count as persuasive evidence here?

Persuasive evidence here would be pretty hard to come by as we are only looking, for the most part, at the actions rather than the rationale. The turnover in staff may also mean that people came in without sufficient time to analyse the situation and those that did thought that the expectation of the low probability event given a short time at that company was low enough to take the risk. I would add that Merrill Lynch and others may have actually had a role in causing and worsening the crunch that has led to their losses.

Are there interesting, non-trivial answers here that are well-founded in evidence? Or is it that there’s a lot we don’t know?

Both, I’d say.

xD.

1 – cited from a judgement of 1569 by counsel for Somersett, a slave, in Somersett’s Case (R. v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett) of 1772 which “held that slavery was unlawful in England (but not other parts of the British Empire”