• Pycharm: proprietary, expensive, full featured with lots of Django specific features including GUI for project creation, extensive auto-completion even in templates,. Very often recommended on the mailing list. $100 for individual license, free for open source and classroom use. Review here.
• Aptana Studio 3: open source, Eclipse/PyDev based and available as an Eclipse plug-in as well as stand alone, full featured with Django code completion etc. Often recommended on mailing list. Comparative review with Komodo, Pycharm, WIng IDE, Netbeans.I
• Komodo: Komdo Edit is an open source editor, Komodo IDE is a proprietary based on it. Some features of the IDE can be added to Komodo Edit with plugins. Both support Django templates fairly well (including highlighting syntax errors). IDE costs $195 for a single license, $87 year for support and upgrades.
• WingIDE: proprietary, full featured, Django support including template debugging. Single license $95 for non-commercial use, $245 for comemrcial use. Support and upgrades $89/year.
• Gedit: a text editor, but it can be turned into a fairly full featured Django IDE with plugins.
• Geany: Lightweight, but surprisingly good auto-completion. No support for Django templates (HTML highlighting only). Not a replacement for any of the above, but light weight. I use it on my netbook.
• Ulipad: Another lightweight option, and what I intend to try next. A text editor with some IDE features, and a Django support plugin.
• Emacs with various modes: no doubt very powerful, but not directly comparable to the others.
• Vim plus plugins: not really comparable with any of the above other than Emacs, and I really do not want to get into that war.

What I have omitted:

• Anything that is not cross platform
• Plain text editors
• Anything lacking documentation (Eric, at least as far as its Django support goes), positive reviews or recommendations on the mailing list.

I currently use Geany, but intend to try Ulipad, Gedit and, possibly, Eric. Geany is pretty good for something that light, but has some shortcomings: unintelligent (if generally effective) auto completion, no support for Django template language (highlights as HTML), and some GUI imperfections.

Twitter focuses on what is interesting

The point of Twitter is to follow people who are interesting, regardless of whether you know or like them, and regardless of whether they have any interest in you (unless they actively block you from following them).

This contrasts with Facebook or Linked In which require some form of acceptance form the other person. Facebook does now have a Twitter like “follow” feature, but its is secondary and not widely used. Facebook also has fan pages for one way relationships, but most people do not have one.

I would be quicker to stop following someone boring than someone obnoxious: very much the opposite of what I would do on Facebook. Interesting people are not necessarily likeable, and likeable people are not necessarily interesting.

The end result is that a typical Twitter user follows large numbers of interesting people (interesting means that their tweets are interesting). This means that a quick glance is likely to find a high proportion of engaging content. In particular it has a high proportion of content that invites further discussion.

Twitter lets you scan a lot of content quickly

Because of Twitter’s 140 character limit on tweets, it is possible to scan a lot of tweets quickly, increasing the odds of quickly finding one that is interesting enough to respond to or that contains a really interesting link.

This increases the odds of a casual glance at Twitter turning into a discussion or leading to a site that is time consuming to read.

Twitter becomes hostile more easily

Twitter encourages users to follow interesting strangers. This is Twitters great strength. It also means that discussions can turn hostile without any social consequences. I cannot imagine anyone on Facebook saying something like “I hate people like you” (something I was told on Twitter a few weeks ago), because they are all either personal friends or family, or belong to some place or community which means they have some real life connection with me.

Because Twitter is more focused on topics than on people it is also more frequently used to discuss controversial topics, and there is no restraint about bringing up topics that may upset people: for example a blog post I recently read on abortion had a paragraph at the start warning that it contained graphic details that could be upsetting to those who have had abortions or miscarriages, that kind of restraint is unusual on Twitter — partly because the terse 140 character limit leaves little room for prefaces or tactful phrasing.

The result is both high engagement (few people quietly back off from arguments once started) and stress.

Twitter is often immediate

In interesting tweet very often gets fast responses, which can lead to an immediate extended discussion. While this is also true of some other forms of communication, social networks are unique in the combination of fast response, high reach (tweets are seen by every who follows the tweeter and anyone mentioned in a tweet) makes fast responses much more likely.

This makes Twitter far more likely to engage a user for a long time than a forum is.

Twitter covers all topics

Because people typically tweet on multiple topics, and follow people interested in different topics, it covers far more that topics that may engage a users. It is perfectly possible to look at Twitter to look for tweets about investment and find lots of interesting tweets on politics or religion (often that one wants to respond to). This happens to me quite frequently.

Twitter is often partly work related

Many people tweet about work related topics (giving one a great excuse to tweet during working hours), but few have the discipline to stick to just that. Once you are on all the distractions are right in front of you.

Try finding an excuse to spend working hours on Pinterest!

Twitter is public and demanding

Most people make their Twitter streams public, so people with similar interests can find and follow them. The problem is that producing a stream of terse comments that you are willing to put in writing in public is demanding. Mistakes are public, lack of fact checking is noticed. It takes effort, but as the effort is demanded in 140 character bursts, it is easy to fail to realise how much time and effort it takes in the course of a day.

The problems are the benefits

The problems are the benefits, not just a consequence, or even just an inevitable consequence. The point of Twitter is to find interesting people with interesting ideas and interesting discussions.

One of the great advantages of Twitter is that, because if you follow someone you see their tweets on all topics it exposes users to a diversity of opinions: especially when combined with its ability to find interesting strangers from anywhere in the world to follow (that sentence would have sounded creepy before Twitter…). This is especially valuable in an age when social media and a huge choice of broadcast and print media make it easy to retreat into a world where conflicting opinions disappear from view.

There is nothing wrong with Twitter. It does what it is meant to, but at a price.

1. The slowdown is historically unprecedented, not just part of a cycle.
2. The reasons for the slowdown are built into our economy and politics, so it cannot easily be reversed.
3. Even if this is just a temporary phenomenon, the results could still be catastrophic.

Slowing technological advance is unprecedented

How far back do we have to go to find a comparable period of slow advance? I have already looked at the rapid advances made from 1930 to 1970, so I need to look at earlier periods of the same length. Some inventions are hard to attribute to a particular period because their development overlapped two or more (the helicopter, for example,) so just sticking to those I can easily verify as belonging to each period

1891 to 1930

Penicillin (the first antibiotic), Bakelite (the first synthetic plastic), the liquid fuelled rocket, controlled and powered aircraft, insulin, the vacuum diode and triode, tunable radio (earlier radio communication took the entire radio spectrum for one channel), the tank, the zip, the arc-welder, neon lighting, dirigible airships, the diesel engine, huge advances in domestic appliances (many of which are hard to attribute to one period).

1851 to 1890

The Bessemer furnace (mass production of steel), liquefaction of gases through regenerative cooling and other major advances in cooling technology, incandescent light bulbs, the telephone, petrol powered cars, pasteurisation, gramophones, radio transmission, the machine gun, modern steam turbine and dynamite.

1811 to 1850

Electric telegraph (single wire), postage stamp, revolver, mechanical computers (Babbage), photography, stethoscope, raincoat, electromagnet, electric motor and generator, anti-sepsis (although not accepted by medical profession for another few decades), marine screw propeller, stapler, vulcanised rubber, closed compression cooling (used in fridges and air-conditioners), fax machine, sonar.

1771 to 1810

Electric arc-light, steamship, electric cell (battery), gas lighting, Jacquard loom, power loom, tin can, lithographic printing, precision lathe, vaccination (smallpox), telegraph (wire per letter, short range), hot air balloon, bleach, spinning mule.

1731 to 1770

Flying shuttle, Arkwright’s spinning frame, sextant, leyden jar, lightening rod, carbonated water, four field crop rotation, Watt’s steam engine (separate condenser), systematic selective breeding of livestock.

1691 to 1730

Seed drill, mercury thermometer, steam engine.

Go back three centuries

With the last of the above, we have finally come to a period where advances are slow enough to compare to the current rate of progress. Nearly three hundred years ago, before the industrial revolution took hold and, at best, in the early years of the agricultural revolution, we had a similar low rate of big break-thoroughs. Even then, I cannot think of any inventions of the last forty years that have had an impact comparable with the three above. If we adjusted for the greater impact of each advance on a lower technological base, then we could probably go back a few more centuries.

The consequences of slow progress are likely to be similar to those of slow progress before the industrial revolution, which will be my final argument for pessimism.

The other conclusion I draw from the above list, is a response to another possibility raised by Rick, that we have not yet recognised the importance of major advances made in the last 42 years. Most of the advances listed above, in all of the many phases of industrial development, were recognised as important fairly quickly. It is possible that we may not recognise major advances for ten or twenty years, but forty years is just to long.

Slow progress is built in

The mechanisms that favour slow progress are now built in to our society.

There seems to be a consensus that big businesses favour efficiency and incremental advances, whereas smaller players look for disruptive advances that could potentially make then big. In an economy now dominated by the big players, regulation tends to favour them. Their importance and articulate lobbying gives them influence on regulation.

The greatest single regulatory problem is patent law, which has increasingly evolved to allow patenting of minor advances, over a much broader range of fields (e.g. the introduction of software patents and, in the US, business method patents). This, combined with patent thickets (lots of patents covering the same machinery, process of mathematics) together with cross-licensing makes it much harder for small companies and new entrants to challenge the giants.

Patents are not the only problem: a high regulatory burden imposes costs (legal departments and litigations, for example) which are proportionately greater for small businesses: there very large economies of scale in dealing with law and bureaucracy. The question of increased regulation really needs a separate post to deal with, so I will leave specifics, aside from patents for another day.

Big businesses also have the advantage of more government help: tax breaks or subsidies to open in a particular location (usually to create employment: but a 100 small businesses will do that more reliably than one big one), bailouts when they fail, and tweaks to regulation.

I do not believe that this will change without massive changes to the structure of the global economy, which are unlikely and may well be painful if attempted.

Even a temporary slowdown will a catastrophe

Assume that my arguments above are entirely wrong, and the slowdown is just a temporary period of adjustment.

Consider what the industrial and agricultural revolutions achieved. By accelerating the rate if progress to far higher than the rate of population growth, humanity achieved sustained improvements in standards of living. The industrial revolution was not uniformly better for everyone, but at least the last 10 years or so have seen progress for most: even in poor countries there is some access to modern medicine, transport and communications.

Fast progress proved Malthus wrong. Not only did the output of feed increase fast enough to support a rapidly increasing population, but improvements in technology simultaneously improved standards of living in other ways.

Resource limits were overcome by new technology: more efficient farming, food storage and transport, were the start. Fuel wood was replaced by coal which was supplemented by oil and a host of methods of generating electricity. Metals were improved by new alloys and processes for using previously impractical or unknown metals (e.g. aluminium and titanium as well as steel) as well as new materials (plastics, fibre glass, carbon fibre) which partially replaced both wood and many metals. Efficiency improvements means we use less of many materials (e.g. in miniaturised electronics.

At the moment we have slow technological advance, but those technologies are are still being increasingly widely used as developing countries catch up. The demand curve will move up without supply increasing, which will mean higher prices: specifically prices will move up faster than incomes in developed countries, and developing countries will never achieve the current standard of living enjoyed in developed countries, because the resources to do simply do not exist.

We have already seen some of the effects of this, most obviously in oil and food prices. Soon it will be everything. Economic development will become closer to a zero sum game.

Although there have been advances, where are the new materials that promised to reduce need for metals? Nuclear fusion as a power source, or even really cost effective ways of using the great fusion reactor in the sky — my favourite alternative energy source, ocean thermal energy (its actually good for the environment) does not even seem to be being developed any more. Is there any technology that can save us from rising energy and materials prices in the offing? If not, the future looks bleak.

What I have in mind most of all is good short term performance of shares in companies that have long term problems or risks, which do not seem to be reflected in the price. A good example is French Connection which always had potential problems which were likely to manifest themselves sooner or later: most importantly a main brand (FCUK) that relied on shock value which would wear off sooner or later,

However, even though the long term weaknesses were visible in more than a decade ago, the price actually peaked in 2004, when it being evident that the brand was weakening. Anyone taking my advice to sell in 2001 would have missed an opportunity to nearly triple their money.

Why did the market not foresee that the brand would weaken? Were investors too stupid to see what would happen, or too deluded to believe the warnings that it would? I do not think so. As long as there was a good prospect that earnings would continue to grow for a little longer, there was a chance to gain a little more and sell before things went visibly wrong. A greater fool expectation.

Investors also look for catalysts for re-ratings. This is reasonable: you may think a company is on too high or low a valuation multiple, but something needs to happen to persuade the rest of the market of this. If you cannot find such a catalyst then you assume the company will continue to be valued in the same way, so you hold, or avoid buying, until you can see a potential catalyst in the near future.

There is also, of course, an element of herd instinct in this as well: its a bit frightening to sell something that the rest of the market still thinks is worth a high valuation and with good prospects for growing earnings. This is part of what makes it possible to find a greater fool (right up until things fall apart) so it is too closely entwined with the greater fool effect to be regarded as entirely separate.

Investors deviate from investing on fundamentals because of their expectations of what other investors will do, so this itself becomes a key source of market inefficiencies.

Patents have failed as a method for encouraging the development of new drugs. The rate of discovery of new chemical entities (i.e. new active ingredients, as opposed to formulations) is falling. Governments are considering measures such as bounties for new drug discovery, because patents are not providing the right incentives. Patents actively provide bad incentives and are a very inefficient way of funding R & D.

A conversation with my daughter about herbs, lead me to explain how new drugs can be developed by studying herbs used in traditional medicine. I also explained that I thought it unfair that companies doing this were able to patent the active ingredient (in the US at least) even though it might have been in use for centuries or millennia in its natural form.

This lead me to start thinking about what those companies deserved. My answer is exclusivity (for a time) on the formulation they develop and get approved. The obvious answer is to give them exclusivity on the formulation (something similar to orphan drug incentives). This would allow others to develop other formulations, making the market more competitive and keeping prices down.

Of course, drugs developed from herbs are only a small part of drug development, what about the development of entirely new chemical entities?

The answer is that doing things this way would still keep an incentive to develop them: it would give the discoverer a lead in developing formulations. It would also get rid of one of the bad incentives of patents, delaying developing new formulations until the patents on the original chemical entity and formulation are close to expire in order to maximise the time for which at least one formulation is in patent. We could expect to get improvements such as extended release formulations much sooner, and we can expect multiple competing formulations to appear for major drugs.

New drug discovery may require funding from governments, but that is required anyway, and abolishing patents would be consistent with rewarding new discoveries with bounties.

There is in any case, extensive government subsidy for the development of new drugs, and the regulatory burden would noticeably increased, so this would be, on balance, more of a free market solution than relying on patents (because we would be rid of the monopoly rights granted by patents).

There are two series of books which I know of which revolve around extremely powerful creature benevolent towards humanity. They are not omnipotent, and far from perfectly good (in fact ready to commit genocide of non-humans for little reason), but they are able, and wish to keep humans completely safe and comfortable. The creatures are Isaac Asimov’s robots and Larry Niven’s protectors.

In both cases they decide to allow humanity to live and develop without their constant presence and intervention — although both decide to intervene subtly without revealing themselves too openly. Sounds familiar?

They do this because human beings need to be able to develop. In Asimov’s books human world’s that use robots gradually die as their culture fails. Niven’s protectors decide that humans do not want or need to be cosseted.

The result is immense suffering, but no one reading either series could say that they would prefer to live in a world in which they were looked after by robots or protectors.

I will not go into the details (those who want them can read the books), but looking at the problem this way can make the argument that we need to live with our choices and their consequences more comprehensible.

Retail sales are obviously going to be an important part of the answer. The UK does have a high proportion of online sales, which in the last 12 months (to February 2012) reached 9.1% of retail sales and a total of £31bn. While this looks impressive, it means that all online retail combined manage about three quarters of Tesco’s UK sales (and less than half Tesco’s global sales).

The real problem is that £31bn of sales, much of which is low margin (because the internet makes price comparisons easy) means an online retail value added that is, at best, going to generate a lot less than that of the UK’s £1,500bn GDP. There is about another £4-5bn from online advertising. We could add telecoms to that, but voice and SMS are not internet services, so we will still be well short of the £120bn or so GDP share claimed. Where does the remaining £100bn or some come from?

I am also very sceptical about claims for continued high growth. With internet access available to 82% of households, most people who want to shop online can, and a high proportion of sales of the products best suited to online sales are already sold online.

Industrial/technological civilisation is inevitably doomed

Lets start with the most grandiose and pessimistic ideas. There are, in fact, several possibilities here, united in that they are explanations of the Fermi paradox, which means that they must apply to any civilisation (not just ours) and any intelligent beings (not just humans). From the Drake equation there should be someone out there, but we cannot find them. An inevitable doom is one explanation.

So, we what could this inevitable doom be?

1. The inevitable invention of a technology that destroys civilisation. We have already invented nuclear weapon and biological weapons, and are likely to invent more. There is a fair amount of potential for biotechnology or nano-technology to produce something nasty enough to bring down civilisation.
2. Resource shortages: his hardly needs explanation. We know we will run out of oil and other fossil fuels, as well as some metals (lithium for example). Even basic materials like wood are in danger. All of these are needed to sustain out civilisation. So far we have kept ahead of Malthus with advancing technology, but there may be some limit that will end this and stabilise the world at a minimal standard of living. See below for more.
3. Natural disaster: not the most probable. We know that really large natural disasters (such as those that caused mass extinctions) happen tens of millions of years apart. This is too infrequent, and, unless the earth is a very safe place compared to other planets the maths will not work.
4. The berserker explanation. This is named after Fred Saberhagen’s berserker books. There is a hostile force (or forces) that destroy every civilisation they find. They may do this to ensure potential rivals never do the same to them, or as a result of past wars. All civilisations are either destroyed or hide themselves, maintaining radio silence.

As we do not maintain radio silence, and, at the very least, anyone with a radio telescope within a 60 light year or so (and expanding) radius will see that there is something in the solar system emitting far more microwave and radio radiation over many wavelengths than the sun should. Given how useful these are (we use them for cooking, radar, communications, medicine and more) it is hard to imagine any technological civilisation not emitting a comparable amount.

Global cooling

One of the commonest criticisms of global warming (as a hypothesis) is that until recently scientists expected a global cooling leading to a new ice age — so why should we think the models are right this time? Suppose that the models were right both times. How can this be possible? It could be true if we were heading for an ice age that was warded off by anthropogenic global warming.

We unlikely to be able to control human activity to balance the two because we would need very accurate models and iron discipline to do so. It would also be made impossible by any positive feedback effects (e.g. from growing/shrinking ice sheers reflecting more/less sunlight back into space).

If we are lucky we may have a choice about whether to regulate human activity to bring about a hothouse or an ice-age.

Some one nasty has some of the missing uranium

A lot of uranium (and other dangerous substances) seems to go missing, much of it weapons grade. Not only is Uranium missing in Iran, but over the years almost every country that has fissile materials seems to have lost some, including some quite large amounts in the US. States that mine uranium include some pretty unstable places, and one wonders whether it really all tracked from mine onwards in the first place — aside from what we know they have lost.. The hundreds of failed attempts to smuggle fissile materials out of Russia alone suggest that some must have been successful.

On the positive side, a small nuclear bomb will only get a section of a reasonably large city, so we are not talking about an end of the world scenario here. On the other hand most press coverage only looks at weapons grade uranium, whereas what is used in civilian reactors (of which there are many) is quite adequate to make a dirty bomb.

Big solar flares are more likely than we think

The big shiny thing in the sky is constantly flaring up like a teenager and causing interference with things like short-wave radio. Most of the time its nothing most of us would even notice. However, a really big solar flare would cause a lot of damage, knocking out telecommunications, satellites and even electricity grids. A big solar flare in 1859 not only set telegraph systems on fire, it generated enough electricity to allow them to operate with power disconnected. The effect on more delicate modern electronics could be much worse. In a society dependent on computers and telecommunications a really big solar flare, or series of them, could d enough damage to bring essential services to a stand still: maybe even for long enough to bring down civilisation. A few days of disruption to power, food and communications could suffice.

We have reached the limits of technological advance

One possible explanation for the slowdown in technological innovation is that we are reaching the limits of what is possible. All the basic key technologies that matter have been invented, and there is no more to come. As continuing technological advance is what had kept us ahead of Malthus, providing replacements for scarce materials, the ability to grow and transport more food, and allowing us to use resources more efficiently, the result of a failure to keep advancing will be reducing resources per capita, and falling living standards: until we reach the point where the death rate (from malnutrition and disease) rises to stabilise the population.

The pace of innovation is slowing (hard though it may be to believe). I have looked at this from a social and political point of view already. I now want to look at the implications a bit more, and also why it seems unbelievable at first. The reality is that we are living on past innovation, and it looks as though we are losing the key driver of economic growth and potential solutions to our most pressing problems.

The idea that the innovation is slowing is hard to accept because it contradicts both the received wisdom of an ever accelerating pace of change, and the experience we have of lives transformed by technology. However if we look at this more carefully, the explanation becomes apparent.

First, to sum up my previous argument: there have been very few big new inventions in the last forty years. The previous forty years saw radar, electronic computers, transistors, lasers, nuclear reactors and many more huge breakthroughs, the peak of a rate of innovation that had been increasing since the start of the industrial revolution. That is probably an understatement as the pace of progress (with some setbacks when civilisations fell) has tended to increase throughout human history, and the the upward trend was continuous in Western Europe (where modern technology as born) since the fall of the Western Roman Empire (and, from what I understand of history, even that setback is now regarded as popularly overstated).

What I did not discuss properly before, was why we perceive the pace of change to be accelerating. If asked for examples of new technologies have had a significant impact in the last forty years, most people will suggest computers, the internet and mobile phones. All these were invented more than forty years ago (even computers with mice and graphical user interfaces). What has happened in the last forty years is that we have made them smaller and cheaper. However this rests on improvements (not breakthroughs) in a very narrow area.

We may now be able too combine a computer and a mobile phone into a pocket sized unit and sell it at a price that makes it affordable to consumers. However this, and most of the other advances of the last forty years are the result not just of progress in a single industry, but are the result of improvements to a single manufacturing process.

The rapid progress has been made in the manufacture of semiconductors, which has continued to follow Moore’s Law. Most of what has been changed is simply the result of being able to fit 30 times as many transistors on a silicon chip at the end of each decade as we could at the beginning. As smaller transistors are faster this meant a thousand fold increase in performance every twenty years, and a million fold increase in the last thirty years.

There are three aspects to the limits of this:

1. The physical limits of what a computer can do,
2. the limits of the underlying technology, including problems lithography and heat dissipation problems,
3. diminishing economic returns from further improvements.

The first is not much of a problem. We are centuries from hitting the ultimate physical limits. To get there we need the invention of whole new technologies — which is exactly what has has not happened.

The limits of further improvements to the processes we have been polishing for the last forty years are likely to be much more immediate. We could see a significant slow down this decade. We are already seeing some changes even in consumer devices that reflect these limits: multi-core processors have become standard (all new computers, and even high end phones) because of the amount of heat produced by ever faster single core processors. We are very close to hitting this.

The diminishing economic returns are also something that is evident, at least in part. The utility of further increases in processing power, and the effect of further increases to increase productivity are becoming limited. We saw huge increases in productivity from early automation: banks once employed vast numbers of clerks just to process cheques. This process was first automated (making it much cheaper) and has now largely been replaced by purely electronic transactions making the margin cost of actually processing a transaction near zero). Those of us who heavily use online information were one of the the last large groups to make large productivity gains, and there are still large cost savings to come in areas such as replacing physical media distribution with electronic. What then?

It is also worth considering what has not happened. We have still not got fusion power (green, and virtually limitless), real breakthroughs in artificial intelligence elude us (much needed given the shortage of the natural kind), and almost every form of transport uses the same underlying technology (jet aircraft, petrol and diesel piston engined cars, electric and diesel powered trains). It would not be hard to extend this list with a many more optimistic expectations of the seventies.

So without innovation, what do we have? Much slower economic growth. If the improvements in semi-conductors, out magic of the last few decades, slows, everything else that has depended on it will stagnate, and that means the whole global economy. It is technological progress that drives productivity, and it is productivity that drives growth. Does anyone question that?

There is room to for global growth by rolling out even more slowly developing technology to developing countries, but this will lead to resource shortages: we need new forms of energy and new materials to make that scale of development possible. I am not even considering the problems of food production and water supply.

The implications just for investors are staggering. It will mean much lower returns on equity investments. This in turn means that the the era of equities hugely out performing bonds may be over. Alternatively, it may lead to lower bond yields as well, as the need for investment capital to roll out new technology diminishes. There may be opportunities in emerging markets, natural resources, and food, but the market growth cannot be expected to continue at past levels for more than another decade or two. This is long term by most standards, but not if you are saving for your retirement.

Opportunities in technology sectors will be very limited. With a slower rate of progress they will become mature industries. There may be some gains for consumers as the focus moves from innovation to quality and reliability or price — as has happened in other mature industries, but this will mean lower margins and limited expansion into new product categories, which means lower returns.

My previous post looked at some of the possible social and economic consequences, such as increasing income inequality. There are also wider consequences. Ultimately, this megatrend affects all the others. Fusion power (or cheap solar power, or any of many other possibilities) would solve out most pressing environmental problems — and the alternative solutions will restrict, or even reverse, growth. We face food shortages that would be relieved by the reduction in the birth rate that accompanies affluence, and affluence spreads to the poor more slowly without technology to drive growth. The developed countries need medical innovation to cope with ageing populations. The unacknowledged megatrend is the biggest of them all. It is perhaps, better called a gigatrend.

I will leave aside my view that the government should not protect people from themselves, and, just for this post,  and, for the moment, accept the consensus that the role of the government includes forcing people to do what the government judges best.

Lets start with the missing information. What is meant by “More than 200,000 people could die early from alcohol-related diseases, accidents and violence over the next 20 years”? Does it mean that the death rate will be 200,000 more than if no one drank any alcohol? Does it mean that 200,000 people will die from diseases, accidents and violence in which alcohol is one of (many) avoidable risk factors?

Of course, as always, The Guardian, fails to but the numbers in context. 10,000 deaths a year is not a huge number in a country the size of the UK: barely over 1%. Depending on he exact meaning of the numbers, the actual number of deaths caused by (as opposed to “related to”) alcohol could be much lower and comparable with, for example, the 3,000 suicides a year. Given the distressing nature of suicide, and its impact on the friends and families of its victims, I think that is sufficient to argue it should be a higher priority.

Compare the impact of alcohol with that of bad diet (too much sugar, too much, and harmful types of, fat, etc.): . There are at least 30,000 deaths a year related to diabetes, and that is almost certainly an underestimate, and it is worsening rapidly, and it is only one of many diseases caused by unhealthy diets.  Worsening rapidly is something of an understatement: the number of people who have diabetes has doubled over the last thirty years.

Diet bring us to another issue. The health effects of different alcoholic drinks is very different:  the amount of carbohydrates in one pint of beer is comparable to an entire bottle of red wine.

That is one possible reason for the lack of correlation between alcohol consumption and life expectancy. Given that, what reason is there to think that reducing overall alcohol consumption will improve public health. In fact a WHO study found that the countries with the lowest level of alcohol related health problems are the wine drinking countries of south western Europe, many of which have very high levels of consumption.

In fact, it may even worsen public health. Moderate drinking improves life expectancy, so price increases that deterred moderate drinkers would lead to lower life expectancies. Heavy drinkers, especially very heavy drinkers, may be addicted, and will therefore be likely to spend more rather than reduce consumption. Abstaining entirely from alcohol carries a similar risk to heavy drinking, why are there no calls for government action to encourage teetotallers to start drinking?

The criticism of a government strategy that relies on voluntary cooperation from the industry, has two serious fallacies. They claim that “the primary requirement for these industries is to deliver shareholder value by maximising consumption”. This is wrong. Individual firms want to maximise profit, which is not the same as maximising consumption: the profit on one bottle of expensive wine is likely to be far more than on many bottles of plonk. It is even possible that a minimum sales price may may the industry more profitable by killing the lowest margin products.

The other fallacy is that because a businesses aim is to make a profit, it is entirely uninfluenced by anything else. Companies are run by individuals who are just as likely to act from ethical motives as anyone else, they are subject to public pressure, and the ability of governments to coerce companies to act “voluntarily” is enormous. Consider the success the government has had in getting internet service providers to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation’s controversial, secretive, undemocratic, ineffective and unaccountable censorship scheme.

I have become very cynical about the reasoning behind calls for action on alcohol. It seems to reflect a fixed, and puritanical, idea that alcohol is bad, rather than an assessment of evidence and likely benefits.