All posts by Ian Angell

New Barbarians in the Home Office

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It seems that mandarins in the UK Home Office have been reading my New Barbarian Manifesto.

At present non-EU nationals who invest £1 million, £5 million and £10 million in government bonds can apply for permanent residency in the UK after five, three and two years respectively.

Now someone in the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has proposed a sealed bid auction of around 100 visas annually, minimum bid £2.5 million, £2 million of which goes straight into government coffers.

Critics say the British Public won’t like this. I beg to differ. The British public don’t want dole queue immigrants. They’d be delighted to welcome the rich who spend money and thus employ people, and pay taxes. In the New Barbarian Manifesto I said that the UK “should drag them of the planes if necessary”. It looks like someone in MAC is thinking along the same lines.

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A three-letter word ending in X

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My friends say I have a one-track mind. I’m always thinking about a three-letter word ending in X. … TAX.

It seems I’m not the only one. For yesterday in the House of Commons MP Ben Gummer stated a fact that has always irritated me. His bone of contention was National Insurance. For non-Brits I should explain that British subjects who earn more that £149 per week has to pay 12 per cent or more of their earnings on a so-called contributions based scheme that supposedly pays for various sickness and unemployment benefits and pensions. Gummer says it is a stealth tax masquerading as a social good.

National Insurance is a sanctimonious euphemism, it is a tax mechanism for redistributing wealth. The state should come clean and admit that it is nothing less than an ‘Additional Income Tax’.

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The joke of non-linear supply and demand

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“You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. The trick is not making the horse drink, but making it thirsty.” 
“Business isn’t selling something you have to someone who needs it, but something you don’t have, to someone who doesn’t need it.”


The old jokes are always the best, and nowadays the joke is on anyone who enters a commodity market wanting to buy something, rather than just using it as a place to park/gamble money in futures options. And who are the suckers who actually want to buy? Everyone who needs food to eat, fuel for energy, raw materials for production.

Phinaes T. Barnum put his finger right on it: “there’s one born every minute.” 
With all the uncertainty in the banks worldwide, where do the ‘jokers’ place their money to take advantage of the ‘suckers’? Into the markets for commodities, which have become a Barnum and Bailey Circus. 
The jokers believe they can use the demand/supply curves so beloved of economists to advantage, but they miss the point, and their jokes rebound.

These jokers either demand but don’t want the commodities, or supply but don’t have the ‘goods.’ What they don’t realise is that their preconceptions of these curves actually feed back and affect the underlying data, and consequently negate the curves themselves by triggering an ‘uncertainty principle.’ In the linear world of theory, the consequences of an action stop with a reaction; in the non-linear world of practice who knows what havoc the feedback will cause?


Pointing mathematical instruments at the market complexity in the practical world of ‘non-linear supply and demand’ can only create instability, because the only certainty is uncertainty. 
There’s no point in measuring something that will change the moment it is measured, and because it is being measured – like the nonsense of British healthcare targets: surgeons push dying patients out of the operating theatre into the corridor, so that ‘death in surgery’ figures are kept low. 


In conditions like today’s commodity markets, the jokers are setting off a non-linear positive feedback sequence, triggering a chain of events within a system that affects their analysis, something the jokers themselves don’t appreciate. The meaning created when they interpret the supply and demand through their own personal filters, is invalidated by the very act of interpreting.


The systemic nature of this situation is often neglected due to the fact that the smug jokers are using the curves to second-guess meaning in the minds of others. When those ‘others’ also contain large numbers of jokers, all confident that they can take advantage of their superior(!) economic (and hence linear) knowledge, then the joke is on them. They are all thinking the same way, and this multiply-reinforcing subjective interpretation will always totally distort the objective world of data. 


Goodhart’s Law comes into play. Charles Goodhart, a distinguished LSE Professor, famously noted: “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed on it for control purposes”. 
Thus the jokers too have become suckers. Welcome to the cosmic joke that is non-linear supply and demand.

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Obamacare Wars

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It’s impossible to read an American newspaper, or switch on the television without a story that says the Affordable Care Act will be devastating to the American way of life, and the country’s economy. Everybody is arguing about it.

A recent report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office claimed that Obamacare would destroy over two million jobs over the next decade. Republicans say that people would choose not to work, or work less, in order to maximise their benefits offered by the government. It sounds just like the dependency culture in the U.K.

The Democrats counter by claiming that Obamacare will increase demand for goods and services, and so boost employment. Of course, being by far the largest sector of the tax-paying public, the hard working middle classes would have to pay to supply that demand. As a result their standard of healthcare will decrease, or they’ll have to pay more.

Will there be dramatic benefits as the Democrats claims? Look out of the window, alongside the Golden Geese, the pigs are flying, and better-off US citizens will have to shoot for bacon.

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Golden Geese everywhere

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It seems wherever I go in the world I am fated to meet high net worth individuals (HNWIs) who for one reason or another are contemplating flying the coop to become fully fledged Golden Geese.

This afternoon (Valentines Day) I was taking a Nature Air flight from Liberia (the town in Costa Rica, not the country) to San Jose (the capital). I got chatting to a US citizen seated in front of me (I’ll keep him anonymous). He was buying real estate in Costa Rica having sold up his businesses in the US. He wasn’t yet contemplating giving up his passport, but he was determined to spend much if not most of his time away from the States.

This time it wasn’t the IRS that was chasing him away. Within five minutes he was telling me a series of stories about gratuitous litigation, and how, because he was perceived to be rich within a community where he had undertaken an educational project, he had become the target for ambulance chaser lawyers of clients with the most spurious claims. He ended up settling out of court, because the legal costs would likely swamp the size of the claim. Also he was given the run around by vindictive petty officials, adding months to the project life cycle.

A disagreement with a partner that led to litigation was the last straw. Sick and tired of these cynical opportunists, depressed by the incessant midge biting, he decided to get out. The end of his American Dream. Sadly his story is all too common.

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The End of the European Union!

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What do you get when you mix the British Pound (B£) with the EURO?

Donning the cap of a ‘Futurologist’ and pontificating on such questions, I’ve had great deal of fun over the past two decades. Never one for false humility, I can say I’ve been very good at it. Just look in The New Barbarian Manifesto and you’ll see a number of my successful ‘prognostications.’ I prefer using that word, rather than ‘predictions,’ because of the way I use my crystal ball – I don’t predict the future, I forecast the present. That’s my secret – I spot trends in the near past, and just follow the trajectories. The hints are everywhere, you just have to see them – and for that you must reject orthodox thinking.

“Don’t state the matter plainly, but put it in a hint;
learn to look at all things with a sort of mental squint” (Lewis Carroll).

It helps to be standing on solid philosophical ground, which provides the consistent perspective needed for that mental squint – anyone who has attended my lectures won’t be surprised to learn that my particular guru is Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s one-liners slice across the hypocrisy of the political classes and strikes at the heart of so many issues. Consider: “Many too many are born. The state was devised for the superfluous ones.” This one quotation lies behind my questioning of employment policies. Mass-production methods needed an over-supply of humanity; the Machine Age spawned the nation-state, but with its demise what is to be done with the glut as we enter the Information Age?

Territory in itself is a liability. New Barbarians do not waste resources subsidising large tracts of land filled with rusting industry and populated with the unemployed. To protect their wealth, rich areas will ‘rightsize’, ensuring a high proportion of wealth generating knowledge workers to wealth depleting service workers.

Barbarians will reject the liberal attitudes of the present century. The expanding underclass they have spawned, and the untrained migrants they welcomed previously, are now seen as liabilities.

I have seen the future …. and in that future, democratic government won’t disappear, but its role will be to nurture, propagate and supply the quality human raw material. Democratic government, or any other kind for that matter, is merely the supplier at the bottom end of the value chain that ultimately supplies wealth. This wealth is not the product of labour, but of individual intellect and determination.

The majority of society, the service and production workers, the unemployed and the underclass, are a drain on a region’s economic potential. In the Information Age, governments based on a universal franchise and chosen by this majority are governments elected by losers. The ‘politics of envy’ is suicide, and the ‘will of the people,’ voting for full employment, a minimum wage, and fair(?) taxation, is merely the turkeys voting for Christmas. The big political question of the coming decades is how to find a socially acceptable means of dismantling democracy. Even with strong political leadership this will be an extremely difficult task, but much of the West, with its cast of parliamentary degenerates, hasn’t a hope.

All these pressures fermenting the Information Age will produce new winners and new losers. Where does the European Union sit in all of this? Its outmoded collectivist and bureaucratic institutions, so steeped in the ‘Factory Metaphor’, are incompatible with the aspirations and expectations of the entrepreneurial networks that are creating the New Order of business. European politicians think that all businesses are run for their benefit, to pay for schemes that will buy them votes.

And you will never reduce government expenses, because those expenses have a vote. The European Union is a disaster waiting to happen. I’m not alone in saying that: Alan Greenspan is convinced that the EU is finished unless it finally leaves the Industrial Age and scraps its highly restrictive labour laws. I ask you to contrast the sentimentality of the European Union’s vision of a Socialist “Information Society”, against the hard-edged American Dream of an “Information Economy.” That says it all. The smart money is on the USA. And that’s only for the medium term. The US too will degenerate unless it can revitalise the American Dream. The future lies with China, India, Brazil, and a few ‘Smart Regions.’

The European Union (EU) won’t make the jump from EU to an e-U, but to an e-USSR. The EU is just the USSR with a forty-year time lag.

The European Union is just another collectivist disaster waiting to happen: the USSR with a forty-year time lag – the EU-SSR. The USSR was born in the Russian Revolution in 1917, and died on the Berlin Wall in 1989. The EU was born with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. My prediction for the year of its demise … 2029.

What do you get when you mix the British Pound (B£) with the EURO? A new world currency that will replace the dollar? No! The anagrammatic ROUB£E.

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Learning the lessons of the Laffer Curve

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During the late 1970s the U.K.’s top income tax rates were over 80%, and yet the top 5% of income taxpayers contributed just 24% of the total, whereas nowadays at much lower tax rates this group pays around 43% of the total; the top 10% paid 57.6% in 2011/12. The top 1% paid 11% of the total in the 70s; and 27.7% in 2011/12 (up from 21.3% in 1999/2000) – raising £44 billion, more than raised from companies. Apart from showing that the wealthy pay a disproportionate amount of taxes, the figures clearly imply that lower tax rates actually increase tax revenues. This counter-intuitive observation seems to support the Laffer Curve theory, which sees two counteracting effects at play in the raising of tax revenue: that of ‘arithmetic’ accumulation and the ‘economic’ consequences. The arithmetic effect is straightforward: revenue collected is the tax rate multiplied by tax-base (the taxable amount available) accumulated across the various bands. The economic effect is the recognition that the tax rates imposed will have a dampening effect on the tax-base – a higher tax rate will trigger tax evasion, more effort in avoidance, less incentive to earn, more time spent at leisure, and some tax-payers permanently leaving the jurisdiction.

At the extreme a 100% tax would mean no incentive at all; no one would bother to work since all the fruits of their labour would all be taken off them. Hence the economic effect of a total tax would mean an empty tax-base, and a consequential tax take of zero. Charging tax at 0% would also bring in nothing. Hence there must be an optimum tax level that maximizes the tax take balancing these two effects. But what level? This is an impossibly complicated calculation that would also have to take into account special circumstances (like paying for a war, or subsiding the unearned bonuses of the banking sector), or the availability of offshore tax havens, or changes in the overall economic climate etc. Nevertheless it seems clear that punitive tax levels actually drive down revenue.

Why is it that the taxman focuses on the arithmetic consequences, but has no conception of economic ones? Does he believe in a kind of Newton’s Law of Taxation: where to every action (that is tax) there is an equal and opposite reaction (namely everybody pays up in full)? According to their simplistic arithmetic logic, tax creates a revenue stream, and a higher tax makes for a larger stream. Not in Laffer’s non-linear world of consequences. The only law the Revenue should consider is that of Diminishing Returns. Taxing is disturbing. There is an uncertainty principle at play here. The act of taxing disturbs and changes the attitude of both the persons being taxed, and those doing the taxing. Those profiting from taxes get an appetite for it, and like Oliver Twist will ask for more. However, keep increasing tax levels, and the tax-base collapses. And when the tax-base collapses, so does the economy, and ultimately so does the country. Death by taxes – a lesson that every socialist state eventually learns. One that President Hollande’s France will learn very soon. The rate of tax needn’t even be that high – the mere introduction of a new tax is interpreted as a statement of intent, a signal of more to come.

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Political Jokes

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In this blog I’ve brought together some of the jokes about politicians that I’ve collected over the years. Just like Will Rogers, in my writings I don’t make jokes about politicians, I just watch them and report the facts. So I really shouldn’t be asking for more political jokes, I’ve seen too many of them get elected. However, if you have any more please let me know.


You just can’t win these days. Do something wrong and you get fined; do something right and you get taxed. You work six months a year for the government. Even government employees don’t work that much.


Nothing is certain except death and taxes. Only death isn’t an annual event, and governments can’t make death any worse than it is. Democracy is nine wolves and a lamb voting on supper. Taxation without representation may be tyranny, but it’s a lot cheaper than the alternative. That’s why I don’t vote for someone, I vote against the rest. If you’ve half a mind to read their manifestos, that’s all you’ll need. Although, if voting could change anything, it would be made illegal.


There is only one way to look at a politician, and that’s down. You can always tell when a politician’s is lying: his lips are moving. A politician will double-cross a bridge when he comes to it, so that he will always be there when he needs you.


Criminals take the money and run. Politicians run and take the money. Parliament is like a bunch of bananas; not a straight one among them. I’ve got a lot of friends in politics. They’re the best money can buy. That’s not strictly true. There are some honest politicians. They are the ones who, once bought, stay bought. It’s a shame how the 99% give the 1% a bad name.


So please send me any new jokes. I’ve had to shelve quite a few since John Prescott is no longer Deputy Prime Minister: How do you recognize John Prescott’s Personal Computer? It’s the one with Tippex on the screen.


Then there are the oldies but goldies;

A surgeon, a gardener, and a politician were walking down the street when they saw a ‘lady of ill repute’. The surgeon said “of course, surgery is the oldest profession. Surgical skill was needed to remove Adam’s rib in order to create Eve.” The second quipped “and where did the Garden of Eden come from? Only a gardener could make order out of the chaos.” “And who do you think created the chaos?” said the politician.

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To e- or not to e-? That is the question

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(article originally published in Ambassador magazine)

According to President Pompidou “there are three roads to ruin: gambling, women and technology. Gambling is the quickest, women the most pleasurable, but technology is the most certain.” So, will e-technology lead companies down the road to ruin? Of course not! They may be damned if they do, but they are doubly damned if they don’t. The very fact that computer technology is so diabolical means that this is a time of great opportunity for those who can manage it appropriately.

Companies must look beyond the functionality of computers, beyond the good intentions of the designers, toward the observable consequential risks and opportunities of integrating computers into business. A good e-technology platform, although necessary, is not sufficient for success. Computers can deal with objective well-structured problems, at amazing speed, but they cannot cope with the subjective subtlety, ambiguity and complexity that is the human condition. Success (and failure!) will be determined by unique social, political, organisational, and particularly personal factors.

Our touching faith in e-technology has uncanny parallels with preposterous claims made in the early days of other technologies. X-rays were once considered harmless novelty, used unguarded in shoe shops to check foot size. In its pioneering days, electricity was promoted as a cure for consumption, dysentery, cancer, blindness and worms.

Nothing has changed! We believe that computers increase business potency. Governments and businesses have rushed headlong into a technology binge, believing that lavish spending will ensure success and progress. No expert can appear on television without the ubiquitous microcomputer peeping over his shoulder. The modern manager is obsessed by computerized methods that claim to model the business environment. But there can be no control over a business environment in which nuances of detail, as well as deliberate, accidental and arbitrary actions feed back and continuously modify and amplify, elements, processes and sub-systems within a firm.

It is sheer madness to believe that measurement and computerization will make our world ‘the way it ought to be’. Yet the gullible manager describes his world neatly in networks of boxes, polygons, circles, and arrows; a world controlled by bubbleware. However, ambiguity cannot be resolved into tidy patterns, and jumping onto a band-wagon of methodologies is merely compulsive stress-relief. Hence the business-world is full of insecure managers who, with their organizational charts, mission statements, with battle cries of synergy, management of change, competitive advantage, business process re-engineering, total quality management, data warehousing and data mining, knowledge management, with their tidy minds, they turn firms into … ‘obsessive compulsive neurotics’.

Neurotic firms want to control their world by computerising the arbitrary use of measurement and numbers; with systems analysis, opinion polls, market research, socio-economic classifications, efficiency audits, cost-benefit analyses. They see themselves in control of a better world, achievable through tidy thoughts, implemented by tidy minds, on that icon of tidiness, the computer.

The obsessive, compulsive quest for computerized efficiency views redundant data as human faults, to be corrected in the world of the virtuous machine. Companies throw telephone-number sums into the bottomless money-pit of computerization, and forget Dennis Healey’s warning: “When you’re in a hole, stop digging”. Their brave new world will not be one of ordered and controlled lives, but a rule-based bureaucratic shambles.

Madness! ‘Information Audits’ claim to represent reality within their limited models, and imply that all decisions can be reduced to a form of algorithmic bookkeeping. Such performance measurement is more akin to ‘reading the runes’ than to any legitimate science. Yet this lust for numerical solutions is spreading. Strategy becomes a matter of controlling the future by labelling it with numbers, rather than by continually re-evaluating the uncertain situation.

But “the figures don’t lie!” According to Mark Twain: “It’s not the figures lying, it’s the liars figuring.” Perhaps numbers are lies: instrumental fictions. Numerical models can only ever be a pale shadow of what actually happens, and can never emulate the subtle, and not so subtle, checks and balances and the feedback of unknown and unknowable interactions. They really cannot hope to emulate the infinity of parameters implicit in the systemic risk of ‘being there’.

Underneath all numerical methods is a belief in atomism, in category. However, category is not truth, merely an act of choice. A choice that says it is OK to treat similar things as though they are the same, and then to assume that all comparisons between such data-choices are absolute facts. But all data is context sensitive. “A fact is like a sack. It won’t stand up until you put something in it” (Pirandello).

Whenever anyone tells you that information is good, more information is better, and computerized information is best, reach for the straitjacket. Only neurotics think that e-technology can control the uncertainty implicit in the real world.

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“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”

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Before starting this article, we should first use the correct quotation:
“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned”.

When William Congreve wrote those words in 1697 in his play “The Mourning Bride” little did he realize he was giving tax advice to errant husbands of the twenty-first century, like Scot Young. Young, a tycoon now fallen on hard times, is at the centre of a bitter £400 million divorce battle with his wife Michelle. The highly acrimonious case has got the whole of Britain in thrall.

Scot Young declared himself bankrupt, owing £2m to the taxman. Claiming to be broke, Scot is unable to give Michelle and their two children any financial help. That having been said, apparently she has received more than £1m from her husband’s friends. Michelle, having lost her privileged lifestyle, was not satisfied. “We are just living one day at a time. He is eating in the finest restaurants with beautiful young models while my girls don’t know their futures”.

She asserts that her husband has salted away large sums, and wants her share. But how can Michelle prove her claim? She can’t. She doesn’t have the resources to track down the money through a maze of concealed deals. However, she knows someone who does. The British tax man!

Scot should have listened to Congreve before giving his old laptop computer to his children Scarlet, 17, and Sasha, 15, to help them study for their exams. Of course he first ‘sensibly’ deleted all his personal files. Mistake! In her fury Michelle got experts to scour the hard disk, and they managed to recover five-years’ worth of encrypted files, containing hundreds of e-mails and other sensitive data on Scot’s financial and property dealings. We can now expect HMRC to unleash its hounds of hell to sniff out any hidden assets, particularly if they can grab a share – and Michelle will grab the rest.

Watch this space!

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