Down came the rain.

The weather forecast for just about everywhere today is for heavy and pretty much continual rain. This should hardly be news in the UK, but we’ve had so little over the past couple of years that large tracts of the country are officially in drought conditions. Not African stylee drought conditions, with bare, dusty ground, littered with the mummified remains of dead cattle, but some smaller rivers have dried up in the South East and much grass land was already beginning to look brown and withered around the edges, something you might more likely expect toward the end of summer, if at all, rather than the middle of spring.

After threats of water shortages, the implementation of hosepipe bans and dark rumours of standpipes in the streets, we now have flood warnings. Not since the late Dennis Howell MP became Minister for Drought in 1976 has there been such a rapid turnaround in the weather. After months with no rainfall whatsoever, coupled with prolonged sunshine, he was appointed by Harold Wilson to deal with plans for water shortages. Within ten days of his appointment, Howell became Minister for Floods.


Dennis Howell MP

Of course, for the aquifers to recover properly, we need a couple months of prolonged and rather gentler rainfall, so the water has time to soak in, rather than run off. That said, it is soaking into our garden right enough – it’s just plain soggy out there, now, but I don’t know about the reservoirs.



Either way, just for the benefit of posterity, I should like to get a photograph – an iPhone one will do – of people with brollies, hats and coats leaning into the driving rain as they scuttle past the ever present drought posters that have cropped up all over London.

Don't trust economists

I was never much good at maths at school. It didn’t interest me and so I didn’t really try. Someone somewhere must have thought I had potential because I got bumped up into the ‘fast stream’ in the second form with a view to taking my O-Level in the fourth rather than the fifth form. The only real result to come out of this was the fact that I struggled through three academic years and failed the early sitting. I barely scraped a pass when I was sixteen, at the normally scheduled age for O-Levels.

The thing is much of the maths you learn at school has very little application to real life unless you go on to become an engineer, or move into theoretical work. I have never knowingly had any use for quadratic equations; I have never needed to know how steep a curve on a graph is at any point. I could add, subtract, multiply and divide matrices, but I never knew what I’d achieved in doing so.

When it came to differential calculus, I was more interested in knowing (though I never found out) why the opposite of integration is differentiation, when it should surely be disintegration.

I flatter myself that I am not stupid and also that I have a certain level of intellect, but certainly in the mathematics or statistics field, it doesn’t extend much beyond plain arithmetic. And that’s okay; I’ve only ever needed plain arithmetic.

From time to time however, this gap in my knowledge causes me genuine (if transient) frustration. I can usually spot if an argument feels wrong, but often I do not have the mathematical skills or data sets immediately available to me to contradict an argument. That can be annoying enough, but even more annoying are the times when you are presented with an argument by assertion, rather than an argument by evidence. I came across one of those today, made by an economist.

Economics is another of those areas that causes me grief. I never worried about it until I got to college and had to endure it for a year or so before I could ditch it as an option. I had two main problems with economics when I was forced to study it: firstly, much of it is highly mathematical (see above) and secondly, to make any theory work, the economist has to remove greater or lesser extent, many aspects of reality. It became clear to me that economics is simply a religion with its mysteries spoken in numbers by its priests so as to hide its inconsistencies from general view and maintain its air of mythical knowledge.

What annoys me most about all this is that as the smoke clears from around the various hypotheses, we find that there are, by and large, two entrenched and utterly opposed factions both of whom happily wield the full force of their numeric discipline to great and devastating effect as if they alone hold the answer to all the world’s economic, and by extension all other ills.

The problem is, that as much as they would like to have us believe otherwise, the entire pseudoscience of economics only works one way – retrospectively. It is possible of course, to make bland assertions that prices will go up if demand outstrips supply, but once you get past the most basic theories, the rest is prophecy, not forecasting.

A good economist can, if given enough accurate historic data, probably work out precisely what concatenation of events produced which results and how. What they are unable to do, though they claim otherwise, is to be able to project an outcome into the future based upon the incomplete data they have at hand at any current time. What they can do, using numbers as their mystic guides is to say with whole-hearted truth that if a, then b and if c then d. They can even combine b and d to project e. But very quickly a becomes aa, b becomes bb and so on, so whatever they project either never happens, happens incompletely or can only be justified by modelling backwards in some kind of ‘newspeak’ so that it looks as though the eventual destination and the route to it were intended from the very beginning.

The reality is much more eccentric, complicated and elusive. As it stands at the moment, the religion of economics may be a fine tool for explaining what happened, but it’s no better than a vague and illusive roadmap going forwards, and one that frequently discounts many realistic probabilities or behaviours that may militate against the desired outcome, rather than accommodating these factors to tighten up the analysis.

You wouldn’t try to plot a method of navigating a manned flight to Mars in that fashion, but politicians, aided and abetted by their high priests willingly steer entire countries’ developments with faith presented as fact.