Steve Hemingway

Jamie Whyte has written a comment piece in the FT entitled Precise Policing for the People of Snodbury. This advocates a market mechanism for getting the results out of the police force what is wanted, or at least a way of looking at what we want out of policing more clearly. The idea is that local communities set shopping list, not of what they want to buy, but what they want the police to prevent, together with some prices. So the diverse benefits of a police force are converted to single unit of account, currency. Private police services providers would then bid to provide policing and would receive, at the end of the year, what they bid less the cost of those offences that they failed to prevent. So serious offences, such as murders and rapes, would take a big chunk out of their income, minor ones, such as parking violations, smaller ones.

Jamie Whyte and Matin Wolfe have been advocating market solutions to political problems for years. Some ideas, go back many decades. Some countries actually implement them - in Singapore you have to bid for a certificate of entitlement to drive your car on the road. I know of no evidence that when these solutions are implemented they fail to work, yet no democratic government ever seems to consider them. I have never seen an article arguing against this kind of solution - although I have seen uncountable articles explaining why it is that conventional solutions require so much money and effort to be made to work. In many cases the more unsuccessful the policy - for example the structure of the CSA, or the New Deal, or the  NHS -  the more convinced politicians seem of the rightness of the  existing approach of central, political micro-management.

Re-reading Jamie's piece I can see that the objection of politicians would be that his proposal would creative an incentive to reduce crime (a weighted average of all crime) to the exclusion of everything else. One images that under this scheme it would be a waste of time asking a policeman for the time, or for directions. Maybe this is the Achilles heel of the scheme. But digital watches are very cheap now, and so are satnav systems. Perhaps it would be a worthwhile trade-off.  Surely we should have a debate about it.

Please accept my apologies for subjecting you to another post on this topic. I am well aware I have written this kind of entry many times. The entry is not rhetorical. I really want to know why serious, intelligent politicians have agreed, seemingly without discussion, that this kind of thing is a bad idea. Maybe I really have just missed something.

At some point, maybe two or three years ago, the Land Registry must have decided to make its data on property sales available to commercial enterprises. An amazing number of websites decided to retail this, generally for no fee, to the house-buying public. Now it is very easy to see the price at which a property was sold. I tend to use OurProperty.co.uk.. This gives much the same information as RightMove, MousePrice etc., but it has some nice touches. For example you can look up property by postcode; by default you get the last two years of sales in this exact postcode, but with a simple click you can extend the time series to 'all time' or - probably - to a fixed period. Also you can extend the search to all properties in that particular road. There are easy links to the most expensive, and cheapest road in a town.

However, yesterday, I came across a site that uses property price data not from the Land Registry, but from the various property portals - FindaProperty, PropertyFinder, Rightmove and (possibly) PrimeLocation. This allows one to spot properties the price of which has dropped recently. Some falls are quite dramatic - I discovered that my neighbour had dropped the price of his house by a hundred thousand pounds. Of course the existence of a large drop doesn't guarantee a bargain. Certainly all the properties I looked at looked expensive even at their reduced prices. I suspect that they mainly were properties which were advertised very speculatively.

I have not found any way of setting up an alert on Property Snake yet. This will be the more useful feature. Our Property sends a digest of sale prices of recent property sales. This is useful to me as if I can identify an investment purchase I can advertise my letting agency services to them. Not that I've ever used it in this way.


Update 18th Dec 2007 Take a look at this page. This is the key table:

Event History

date	event
04 May 2007	First day listed (price £239,950)
06 Sep 2007	Price changed from £239,950 to £219,950
12 Nov 2007	Status changed from listed to delisted
18 Nov 2007	Status changed from delisted to listed
10 Dec 2007	Price changed from £219,950 to £185,000

Links

Our Property

I have begun discussions with some partners in Zhuhai about investment in Chinese Real Estate. Zhuhai is a pretty nice place as can be seen from Wiki Travel, which is where I've stolen this lovely picture from.

My initial research indicates that a typical 2-bed apartment costs of the order of GBP 22K, and produces a gross yield of around 7%. The FX risk must surely be only on the upside.

Zhuhai is not as expensive as Shanghai or HK, but is more expensive (by a factor of 3) than less-developed parts of China. My own choice is largely dictated by the contacts I have in PRC.

I understand that it is legal now for foreigners to own real estate in China. There are obvious issues about title, law of contract, leases, taxes etc. etc. There are many issues to resolve, but my strong view is that PRC is a much better location for real estate investment than the USA or Europe (with the possible exception of Germany).

This entry was made originally on this date in my Livejournal blog. It is the beginning of a voyage which has lead me to purchase six apartments in China and transfer another million or so yuan, by now, which is towards the end of the year. You can find out more by looking at mingwei.co.uk. I sincerely believe in the China real-estate story, especially Zhuhai which has so many factors in its favour.

There is an astonishingly good article in this month's Prospect Magazine about Tax Credits. The article is admirably balanced and I urge you to read it as an outstanding example of the sort of article that not even the Economist or the FT can deliver about one of the most important policies of the Labour government of the last ten years, whose architect is very clearly identified as Gordon Brown.

The practical difficulties encountered by claimants are crystallised in the claim form itself, which requires individuals to compile statistics from various sources. Aside from earnings over the previous year, the form asks how much individuals have contributed to PAYE, pensions, social security and gift aid. And calculating childcare costs means individuals having to try to account for fluctuations in circumstances, such as school holidays. The guidance notes themselves run to 50 pages.

The story of how a simple idea first put forward by Milton Friedman could have delivered a system in which 5.4 billion pounds have been "misdirected" over the last three years is painful to read. Yet again the story involves the drafting of bad law combined with a disastrously-implemented computer system. As usual nothing has been done to learn from the mistakes, and EDS, the developers of the original system have been rewarded for their failure with more government contracts. Will they ever learn?

References

Tax Credits: the Success and Failure

I have posted about the Tivo before. After my old PACE box stopped responding to the IR wand I ended up getting a V+ box. This is a truly, diabolically, bad device. Extraordinarily, the responsiveness to the menu is  can be measured in minutes, so it is totally unusable as a PVR, but it does, more or less, function as a STB.

Unfortunately the V+ box, which appears to be manufactured by Scientific Atlanta, will not respond to any of the codes listed under Scientific Atlanta in the Tivo setup screens.

Amazingly, though, the V+ box does emulate the Pace 4000 device. Somehow I discovered this from the Tivo Portal page below. I can't find the exact place now, so I'm creating this page in the internet to help others out there who might have the combination of Tivo and Virgin V+ set top box.

After sitting under my TV for a couple of months the Tivo has suddenly returned to full utility. I'm very glad my lifetime subscription is still running.

References

Tivo Portal Page on STB support

I ordered a Motorola A1200 'Ming' phone from HK. My friend and colleague Lua came back with one from China earlier this week and as soon as I saw hers I wanted one. It is a mobile phone that runs on Linux!!!!!

This means that my phone now has far more processing power, and a much more powerful operating system than most of the computers I used to develop software on. Way back in the 80's when I worked at Psion André Schapps used to joke about writing FORTRAN compilers to run on washing machine processors, but now I have no doubt that it would be a breeze to write a C++ compiler on this phone.

I rather doubt I'll use many of the smartphone features - I am one of those curious individuals who mainly uses his phone to make and receive calls, although I do occasionally listen to the FM radio on my K750i, having repeatedly tried and failed to use it as an MP3 player. I have succeeded, but the Sony PC software is so dire that it really isn't worth it.

Anyway, I have never owned a Motorola phone. Like Nokia it seems to have fallen by the wayside as a producer of highly-rated phones. I am amazed that it has not released the Ming to the USA or to the UK.

You can get one on ebay, from HK. Please write a comment if you are interested in getting one of these & I'll see if I can get a quote for a bulk shipment (maybe 20 phones). The postage costs from HK are very high, although the prices are always sooo competitive. I would have to pay and charge VAT.

Information on A1200 Ming from Phone Scoop

The Arcadian Singers are a splendid outfit. I heard them sing last night (2nd June). I know as much about hard core choral singers as Posh Spice knows about quantum electrodynamics. However everyone in the audience seemed to think they were very good, from the prolonged polite applause. A substantial number of undergraduates gave up a large chunk of their Saturday evening to hear long recitals of:
Bach: Jesu, Meine Freude
Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem
Bruckner: Christus Factus Est

so the Arcadians must have been pretty good.

References
Arcadian Singers Home

Every day I seem to read an article about how there is an explosion of global credit. Certainly asset markets suggest that this is happening. There are many culprits. Hedge funds, to whom banks are falling over themselves to lend, private equity players, who are similarly flooded with savers' capital, every public and private company. Anthony Boulton is complaining that lending can now avoid the sorts of covenants that previously protected the lenders' interests.

A few articles have explained that although a lot of the individuals who make lending decisions are very unhappy about the lending situation. Perverse incentives rear their ugly head: individuals' bonuses are linked to fees earned from lending large sums. These fees are not returnable if the loan goes bad. The financial system has never solved this agency problem.

My own take on this situation is that asset markets will continue to levitate until there is some spectacular collapse. My own plan is to stay long and hope to bale out quickly enough. Wish me luck!

References

1. The Agency Problem
   
2. Martin Wolf's article on why banks are chronically prone to collapses (possibly available here without having to pay a subscription.