Forget the presentations, the bonding exercises, the sales pitches, executive bonuses, company cars and other corporate paraphenalia: it belongs in the past. Today we need to adjust to accelerating climate change, political instability, there simply isn’t time for the other stuff. People are waking up to the planet’s problems a couple of generations too late,
Who is driving the business?
Census figures do not come close to providing any insight into the level or nature of economic activity in a given county or town. The productivity of 100 potters in Stoke on Trent during the 18th century could be considered substantial, but of a different quality to Josiah Wedgwood (in portrait). Few would argue that Wedgwood was a powerful agent of change on many fronts, yet this famous Unitarian went unrecorded in Anglican records of any kind.
Technology is a key to transforming productivity, but only in the hands of people with vision. Technical finesse will not redeem a boring or uninspired artefact, but serve to emphasise its lack of distinction.
Tony Wrigley has written this accessible account of how the treatment of census data is changing in today’s more broadly-based research world. The answers to life’s mysteries are no better than the questions we pose to define them.
What’s driving the business?
Own label instant coffees are made with the same sort of coffee beans as their branded counterparts. The only difference is that the retailers control the pricing and, as retail brand owners, they are not held to ransom for shelf money. The Consumer Association magazine Which? is advising readers to switch to cheaper own label alternatives. To stand up its story, Which? gives the example of a 200g jar of Nescafé Original, which was selling for five and a half quid in supermarkets last year and is now the thick end of eight quid a pop on Ocado. Given the scale of Nescafé’s economies of scale in the procurement and manufacturing stages, how does one explain a 30% year on year price rise? Sure, the beans are more expensive, but what does the future hold for premium home delivery shopping channels?
Like rabbits out of a hat
Unlike any other science, economics is prone to give away the plot before the curtain rises. Behind the scenes, everyone is committed to turn out a happy ending, almost regardless. There is ambivalence towards change, even though the job description is built around identifying and predicting the future without fear or favour.
In the summer of 1914, the Ministry of Labour started collecting the food data for the Cost Of Living Index Number. Straight out of the gate, there is no way in which vegetables other than potatoes can be included in a year-round constant economic indicator. Potatoes can be stored all round the year and can be shipped from growers all over the world, whatever the season. We have already listed the foodstuffs that were monitored and index-weighted against other products or sectors. Having seen what the Ministry of Labour brought to the table, it is time to look at how the price points for these goods were settled. The researchers searched out prices displayed by over 5,000 retailers, even though there was a lot of repetition in the mix. In some areas, shopkeepers voluntarily maintained the same prices for known value items (KVI), a practice that would be unthinkable in the twenty-first century.
In the initial layout stages, some prices would be queried: if the point is to gather live data, it should be taken as found, warts and all. Modern food manufacturers refer to a group of products that are “liquid with identifible lumps” and I would apply the “identifiable lumps” analogy to raw price data. The lumps are the very point of the work in hand, giving both insight and substance. The process moves up a gear, averaging the product families and applying percentage shifts to some big and bulky calculations. Statistics at this level is not for the faint-hearted. The table below, taken from November 1, is an example of the genre. Readers will notice that in this table, farthings are counted as 0.25, but this will change in the not-too-distant future to an integer, pure and simple.
The consumer panel was first used by the Board of Trade in 1904, when 1,944 urban working households were recruited. A footnote on page nine of the evidence volume reads:
The validity of using the budgets of 1904 was confirmed by the Working Classes Cost of Living Committee of 1918, under the Chairmanship of Lord Sumner, who reported that it was fairly certain that “Between 1904 and 1914…..no considerable changes took place in the mode or standard of living.”
The household data was calculated on the basis of the weight of food purchased, making comparisons between years more reliable, the civil servants argued. It is a moot point that a shop price in pounds, shillings and pence should resolve into a comparable pounds and ounces value at the table. To start with, the purchasing power of cash can and does change. The world in which we live is moving away from meaningful comparisons with previous eras, which need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Why following the money will cost the earth
If there is one thing that humanity has failed to learn, it is that money is not a meaningful measure of anything. Faced with a goal to achieve and offered a choice of unlimited money to throw at it or unlimited time to let a solution emerge from the woodwork, most of us would imagine that money would help us to solve any problem. The reality is nowhere near as clear as it first appears.
Money hires people’s time for a set period of time, but does not itself create any goods or services that can be made or delivered for a set time. There is a wider world of resources that are available for money under certain circumstances and/or purposes. But, once again, not everything falls into this category.
One thing you can’t buy is time. But, many thousands of years ago, the ancestors of the human race had more time than they knew what to do with and they used it to leverage their modest resources. During several millennia, they started to influence the local flora and fauna, clearing spaces with fire and attracting both prey species and fresh plant life. The size and number of habitable locations at this time was tiny, as the planet went through a series of ice ages. Only very localised corners of the globe could support life as we might imagine it might have existed at the time; places where volcanic activity kept permafrost at bay. In these rare pocket sanctuaries, lived the first generations of primitive species that would later leave their refuge and inhabit a warmer world. We will never know what sort of lives these creatures led, but we can be reasonably sure that money was not on the wishlist. Living hand to mouth in a remote but habitable enclave was no mean feat. We can only guess at what they did with their time on Earth, but it was probably much the same from one generation to the next.
Researchers reckon that there was a period of at least four millennia during which early humans and the natural world interacted. James C Scott argues that this period of inter-species preliminary contact probably lasted six or more millennia, spanning hundreds of generations on both sides. In his book Against the Grain, Scott warns that any linear notion of progress we might form in the comfort of the twenty first century has no place in prehistory. The chances are that there wasn’t even a word for it…
A document preserved for the future
This copy of the Royal Commission’s 1925 report started life as a loose collection of pages: Newport public library bought and bound a set to make it available for future readers in the reference library.
Consumer protection would be a good thing
A preamble to Appendix four, written by a senior MAFF official in the 1920s, confirms that both retailers and shoppers alike lacked any recourse to protection from fraudulent traders and wholesalers. The document was drafted as a government response to the recommendations of the Linlithgow committee. The ministry takes every opportunity to declare that it is powerless to tackle commercial abuses such as underpaying market gardeners for their fresh produce. The Linlithgow findings are filled with talk of malpractices on a huge scale, but somehow MAFF argues that this cannot be tackled head-on because very few cases would be brought. It sounds and reads like the food industry debate to set up the Grocery code 20 years ago.
While we are on the topic, I will add some posts about French parliamentarians Jean-Paul Charié and Michel Raison, in the context of an investigation carried out for the French parliament in the 1990s
Time to reflect?
We share a planet with millions of creatures who contribute to planetary processes that keep us alive and yet in ignorance. As a species we have been technically outstanding, but we have ridden roughshod over our neighbours. While proto-agriculturists dedicated millennia to domesticating the forerunners of modern farm animals, they never stopped to reflect on the special role they played in humanity’s most positive phase.
As human populations settled, the first quality they lost was a deep awareness of a wider world beyond their existence. By leaving the land and settling in cities, humanity extinguished any remaining spark of interest in the outside world. This is just one of our nemeses emerging from the shadows. Others will catch us out sooner, but they lack the central importance of a planetary view of the natural world. Writing in Against the Grain, James C Scott reminds us that without the millennia during which prehistoric populations domesticated crops and livestock there would never have been agrarian city states. He also argues that such an important process need not be a linear progression, but that during those years human populations would have probably have lived by more than one activity, the exact combination of which would have changed with the prevailing conditions. Life in prehistory was difficult enough, without trying to stick to a linear progression from nomad to city dweller.
Humanity is too busy chipping away at nature’s remaining toeholds to spot that we, too, depend on similarly fragile foundations. Urban Food Chains started as a repository for interesting insights into the origins of what we eat. Today, it draws from a broader set of sources, in greater depth.
Starting to unpick an index value
Part of the challenge of tracking down significant trends and developments in old datasets is to work out how the original compilers would have used the results. Fortunately, the Board of Trade left some clues in this snapshot of long term food price trends. The index weighting listed at the foot of the page suggests a way of reverse-engineering price differentials in a fairly robust way.
Having copied the data and the weighting factor into a two column spreadsheet listing, we can apply a SUM function to the weighting factor column. We find that there are a total of 360 tweaks applied to the base sample.
Table 6 of Appendix 3 in the Royal Commission’s report shows a series of index numbers (1900=100) for retail prices of food in London covering the years 1892 to 1914. Note that 1914 records values for January to August 1; September 1 to December and whole year. The year will be evaluated separately, since there is more movement in the economy.
Taking the figures up to 1913, bread prices rise due to currency movements (an import dependency) as well as variable levels of market availability. Meat prices, too, show a series of significant increases. The basic {index year = 1900} presentation conceals a lot of underlying trends. The difference is plain for all to see when the index weighting factors are applied from the footnote to the data. The result is a much lumpier dataset when the modified index numbers are applied (yellow box, above).
In a spreadsheet, the year looks like this:
Applied to a small sample, it starts to look like this:
Shrinking future?
UK food production is set to decline in the medium term, due to a number of factors.
The first is that farmland is going out of production and is being sold off to non-farmers. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) is in a separate running battle over government plans to impose inheritance tax on farms, neither side conceding any ground in a fiercely argued war of words. Over the past year, 400,000 hectares of farmland has been taken out of production and will never be recoverable as farmland. Prime minister Keir Starmer concedes that inheritance tax can have a significant impact, but argues that tax efficient strategies will keep farms in business. “That’s why I am absolutely confident the vast majority of farms and farmers will not be affected by this,” he told journalists. “It’s important for us to keep communicating how that works. Over the £3m, it’s then 20% rather than the usual rate (40%) and it’s payable over 10 years.” However, these figures only apply to farms passing from one generation to the next, which is no longer a reliable assumption to make. What is more, given the high average age of UK farmers, there will be less chance of the gaps between generations being as long as 10 years.