‘The Somebody Else’s Problem field can be run for years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting or can’t explain.’
The SEP, as I hope many of you remember, is a cloak of invisibility featured in Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything. It perhaps arises from a universal aspect of socially driven behaviour – one which encompasses the Bystander Effect, the Overton Window and the Too-Difficult Box.
Strangely, Donald Rumsfeld misses out one of the four (un)known (un)knowns: he does not mention ‘unknown knowns’ – things that we know but aren’t aware of knowing, or pretend not to know. Yet this quadrant is rich in information, from tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi’s ‘we know more than we can tell’) all the way to wilful blindness.
One of my favourite instances of a tacit understanding being breached happened in 1999, when someone (perhaps a proud Australian) fired up a barbecue in the interval at Glyndebourne. Nowhere in the previous 75 years of opera-going had it been necessary explicitly to prohibit this; it was just something universally understood. Life here in the south-east is packed with such shibboleths. Having grown up in Wales, I rely on my English wife to navigate the many unwritten laws of our Saxon occupiers: had I first visited Glyndebourne on my own, I might well have rigged up an extension lead from a nearby building and started microwaving things.
But there are weird blind spots and third rails of this kind in political thought. Strange as it may seem to read this in The Spectator, I am delighted that people are finally discussing wealth taxes. Not because I am an uncritical supporter of wealth taxes in general, but because the country is doomed unless we can at least start a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of taxation without a bunch of nerds at the Treasury closing down the debate. In particular we need to start considering the role of land as both an untaxed source of wealth and an obstacle to acquiring it, depending on when you were born. There is an obvious starting point: council tax has become an embarrassing absurdity, where the owner of a semi in Bolton can pay more than the owner of a mansion in Kensington. Stamp duty is similarly idiotic.
Having grown up in Wales, I rely on my English wife to navigate the unwritten laws of our Saxon occupiers
While reading Mike Bird’s excellent book The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset it struck me again and again that, as a Someone Else’s Problem Field, land value is the Jimmy Savile of economic thought: a problem hiding in plain sight; something everyone can see yet which is filed in the too-difficult box to be conveniently ignored. Fans of Henry George and the Land Value Tax have included Milton Friedman, Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill, Sun Yat-sen, Vivienne Westwood, Joe Stiglitz and Martin Luther King, yet it somehow gets kicked into the long grass every time. If you want a further endorsement, Marx hated the idea.
Land is not even included as a distinct asset class in the UK National Accounts, despite being one of the largest asset classes in the economy. Instead it is included in the value of houses and other buildings under ‘produced non-financial assets’. This is clearly daft: houses haven’t got much more expensive, land has.
In these very pages, I recently explained that you could use land value capture to pay for the whole of HS2, while also creating much needed housing along the route. I expected someone either to prove me wrong, or else to discuss adopting the idea. Nothing. We’ll just have to wait another few decades for the SEP to run out. After all, we kids could all tell Jimmy Savile was a perv back in 1975.
Comments