Letters | 19 January 2017

Particle of faith

Sir: Fraser Nelson draws our attention to the most worrying aspect of economists getting it wrong, which is their reluctance to recognise it (‘Don’t ask the experts’, 14 January). Some economists, seduced by sophisticated mathematical models, aspire to the status of, say, particle physicists, who can tell us they have found something called the Higgs boson. The fact that we tend to believe the particle physicists despite being more familiar with prices, jobs and buying and selling than with quantum equations comes down to physicists having a long track record of heeding the biologist E.O. Wilson’s advice: ‘Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong.’
Jon Wainwright
London SE5

Health warning

Sir: Rod Liddle lists some of the reasons that have been put forward to account for the current crisis in the NHS and adds another of his own (‘The lies we tell ourselves about the NHS’, 14 January), but short of urging that we don’t give the service any more money, he has no suggestions of how to improve matters.

May I suggest the opposite? Of all the developed countries in Europe, Britain spends the lowest proportion of its GDP on health, and half what the USA does. How can we expect a first-class service if we spend the money elsewhere?
Dr Ian McKee
Edinburgh

Illiberal lefties

Sir: Last week’s Spectator (14 January) achieved a remarkable meeting of minds. Your tame leftie (Rod Liddle) and your equally excellent in-house right-wing ideologue (James Delingpole) both excoriated the ‘liberal left’. But they’re both wrong. In its intolerance of views other than its own, its ambivalence about freedom of expression, its assumption that bigger government is better government and its arrogant, self-satisfied hypocrisy, today’s left is anything but liberal.