In the coming election, we have a choice, it seems.

Direct Democracy: the wisdom of crowds.
Parliamentary Democracy: the wisdom of clowns.

At least that’s how it looks after the long five-year stretch of this dreadful Labour parliament.

The wisdom of crowds is often seen as mob rule. Anyone who has witnessed the “flaming” of someone on the internet, whether in the blogosphere or the newer social networks, will know the sickening verbal violence involved, often with accompanying death threats.

In California, where direct democracy, in the form of citizen-inspired referenda holds sway over the state government, people often vote for a measure while simultaneously rejecting the money to fund it. Not surprisingly, the Sunshine State is bankrupt.

In Britain, where our more homogenous population (at least until Labour got in) usually means a more sensible result, the public would vote down most extremist measures. Parliament would, of necessity, vote the money for genuine popular concerns.

A reasonable extension of direct democracy might moderate the stultifying control of a government and political class that has all but destroyed the country in a decade. A move towards more referenda in selected policy areas would add to our shrinking stock of democratic accountability.

As always, the Syntagma Law of Up-To-A-Pointism should be the restraining principle.

* * * * *

Up-To-A-Pointism: If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences. Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.

The overwhelming majority of people are programmed to operate within a rather narrow band of experience, even the high-flyers. Once activity breaches the limits of that band, whether above or below, they rapidly lose all sense of reality. No-one can really be trusted to behave well in the wider interest when events are excessively good or painfully bad.

* * * * *

As for Parliamentary democracy, not many people would vote for what they regard as the wisdom of clowns now. Parliament will need careful nursing in the medium term to regain the affections and trust of the electorate.

Specifically, it should draw back its ancient powers of legislation. It’s no good pretending. Voters are aware that most of our laws are made in Brussels, even the so-called Equality Bill, despite the gold-plating of Harriet Harman. Without competence over all our lawmaking, the House of Commons will never command the respect of the people, as once it did.

The wisdom of crowds is good at spotting wrongdoing and corruption, especially when informed by a free press and media including the internet. It is not good at framing legislation or passing general laws in which it has no interest. Up to a point, it can be used to bolster common sense and legitimacy in a rarified and out of touch political class.

A blending of choices might just return the wisdom of clowns back into the Wisdom of Crowns.

John Evans

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I started my publishing career on the internet in 2003. The technology was primitive by today’s standards, but amazing for the times.

The new Amazon Kindle DX eReader, with 9.7in screen

My first venture involved a static website called The Dial. I created business “How-To” eBooks — by far the easiest to sell — in a desk-top publishing program and converted them to PDF. It was laborious getting the pages to format properly, but the result was satisfying and professional in appearance.

The files were uploaded to a specialized part of the website, from where they could be downloaded by customers paying between $5 and $9 per book. Only the American market was sophisticated and enterprising enough for the products in those days.

I didn’t make a fortune, but it opened my eyes to the attractions of the internet and especially “e” formats. The astonishing thing was, you could actually make money by selling nothing … well, electronic files to be exact. It was cheap, labour intensive at first, but once it was up, the cost factor was negligible. The future had arrived.

Now, mainstream published books are being sold as e-books readable on devices even more convenient than the print versions. Amazon’s Kindle, the market leader, will hold up to 1500 complete titles, obtainable from a free 3G mobile network. While current bestsellers can cost more than discounted print copies, out-of-copyright classics may be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg in attractive rich-text versions.

I had hoped to buy a Kindle over Christmas, but the big 9.7in screen model was unavailable in Britain. A 6in “global” version was purchasable from the American website. We are now hearing that the Kindle DX will be on sale here in a matter of weeks.

Meanwhile, many other models are appearing, from the Sony e-reader to Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which uses Google’s Android operating system. Everyone is piling into this market. It’s the “next big thing” in electronics, mainly because it offers a new platform for newspapers and magazines.

Right now, the market is full of potential but is not quite ready for the big time. A 6in screen is just too small for comfort, little different from the bigger mobile phones. An iPhone has a 3in screen, a BlackBerry Curve has a 2.5in, measured diagonally.

What a 6in screen looks like can be mocked up by folding an A4 sheet of paper in four, that is, folded twice. The A6 result has a 7in diagonal. Chop an inch off it and you’ll see what I mean. The new 10in e-readers (9.7 for the Kindle DX) can be compared in size to a large paperback book, perfect for carrying around — and reading. This technology is set to barnstorm next Christmas.

Imagine what can done with it. School books and lessons could be loaded into these devices via mobile networks and given to students. In the present weather conditions, children would be able to study at home, prompted by emails to their mobiles or even the device itself. Almost certainly, this is the future of education.

Any political party that says it can’t cut a chunk off the education budget, does not understand what this technology is set to do.

Newspapers and magazines also will be revolutionized by large-size e-readers. Currently, there’s hardly a print paper in the world that is not considering charging for content from their internet sites. There simply isn’t enough advertising revenue to go round online.

Rupert Murdoch has signalled that his fleet, which includes The Times (London) and the Wall Street Journal, will adopt a micropayment system (pay-per-article) later this year. The Times is already chopping up comment pieces into two or three pages, a move which increases the number of pageviews, allowing the site to charge more for its advertising space.

From the same stable, The Sun, has pulled its much-read Columnists link from the website, so if you want to read Trevor Kavanagh’s commentary pieces you must buy the paper, page-3 girls and all. Many people wouldn’t be seen dead with it under their arm.

The rival Spectator magazine has recently adopted a “six-ways-to-pay” system, with just a few taster articles given away free online. Everyone is doing it.

The answer, though, lies not in elaborate charging mechanisms, with stingy giveaways that enrage loyal readers, but in the new e-paper and e-ink technology. And imagine the scope for smaller publishers to produce high-quality e-ink magazines and journals, even taking on the big boys.

The more popular blogs could be produced as eMags on subscription, even some of the political commentary sites might benefit, perhaps with extra material not available online. It would be almost like real publishing again.

Syntagma’s prediction for 2010 is that e-readers will become the must-have item for the discerning consumer, and the 10in versions will be how, increasingly, we read newspapers and magazines. In the jargon, we will consume news and comment on electronic, book-sized, wafer-thin devices, paid for by subscription, with daily downloads via 3G mobile networks.

Already, some American papers and magazines are testing the waters. As with simple e-books back in 2003, they are way ahead of the game.

Newspapers will survive. But not as we know them now.

So, here’s a New Year toast to e-ink.

John Evans

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The Conservatives have just announced that companies like Google and Microsoft will, in all probability, provide the technologies behind their new scheme for replacing the abysmal NHS computer system — likely to cost as much as Trident.

[Aside] Stephen O’Brien put up a sturdy case on the Today programme this morning, much better than the hesitant Andrew Lansley yesterday. A pointer to the future? [/Aside]

The latest in the spate of Labour train wrecks in the large computer field is said to be costing up to £20 billion. Given the present government’s hopeless record on public debt, this is nothing less than scandalous.

I use Google’s cloud services for lots of online applications, including the wonderfully-reliable Gmail — Googlemail in the UK if you didn’t get in quickly enough. In 99.9pc of cases, they work like atomic clocks.

Would I prefer a Google/MS solution to the cavernously wasteful Labour alternative? You bet!

Would I prefer a Google system to one produced by fading Microsoft? On balance, yes. It’s easy to say, “I wouldn’t trust my information with Google”, but who would you trust it with? The alternatives are:

1. Paper files at the doctor’s surgery — which may be broken into regularly by drug addicts and dealers.

2. The failed NHS computer leviathan.

3. An unknown provider.

4. Microsoft — not yet fully “in the cloud” and struggling with its desktop applications.

5. Google — imperfect maybe, but by far the best out there.

If we are going to do this, let’s at least choose the best. It will also be vastly cheaper than Labour’s solution, even when we’ve written off Brown’s £20 billion.

John Evans

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What is Emily Maitlis on?

Emily Maitlis and Nick Owen on the BBC News Channel

The Newsnight presenter is usually somber and on the ball during her late night appearances in Jeremy Paxman’s chair. But catch her after lunch on the BBC’s News Channel and she giggles like a schoolgirl, often for no apparent reason.

I’m not complaining, it’s good to have a bit of life injected into this often funereal blanket of news.

But what is she on? Either the BBC canteen serves a good wine at lunch, or … she’s very ticklish.

Lots of chatter about “one-term Tories” last week. This golden Labour scenario sounds like it was invented by someone with a vested interest in the Labour leadership and hopes to avoid a generational shift.

Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, perhaps?

It presupposes that David Cameron gets bogged down in the first years of his premiership and becomes so unpopular that the country turns back to Labour with relief in the subsequent election. Margaret Thatcher’s first period in office is cited. It was fraught with recessionary woes and nearly collapsed but for the Falklands War.

The difference now is that the country gives ownership of the nation’s economic plight to Gordon Brown and Labour. They also know that Brown’s frantic attempts to fix it have failed, with more failure to come.

However bad it gets in the next Parliament, Labour’s wishful thinking will not be granted. Disaster on this scale requires a generation to forget.

With careful stewardship, the Conservatives can count on three periods in office at least. They should develop a To-Do list that will last them for three Parliaments. It will take that long.

The first of March is the beginning of my Spring Offensive. This is when I throw off the torpors of winter through a programme of rigorous diet and excercise.

Last year the American tech blogosphere was heavy with “fatblogging” — a form of ritual torture which not only hammers the body but also gets the sufferer to write about it in detail for the consumption of fellow addicts and bemused onlookers.

Naturally, I’ll not be going down that road in 2009.

Like many another, I put on a few pounds during the months of dark nights and midwinter festivities. This year I have one stone to lose by the end of March. It may not seem much, but that’s quite a lot of weight.

One stone — or 14 pounds — is the equivalent of five copies of The Sunday Times. Next time you’re in a newsagent’s on a Sunday pick them up and feel how much added padding that represents. You’ll be shocked.

So I hope to shed one Sunday Times and a magazine section each week through March. No doubt some weeks I’ll only manage a Mail on Sunday, and may even be heard cursing, “Damn, I’ve put on a News of the World in seven days!”

So exercise has to be part of the plan too. My aim is to similate the fitness of a Mountain Man, who is said to walk up mountains (hills, really) at the same rate as he walks down — no mean feat, and tough on the quadriceps.

As it takes six weeks to reach the maximum fitness you can attain without professional training, I usually start this part of the programme in mid-February.

The diet begins tomorrow the 2nd of March, on the principle that it shows an excessively eager nature to start too soon.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

If you’re looking for a good read on the wild and woolly side, there’s no better publication to start with than The Hedge Fund Journal — there had to be one, didn’t there?

I’m always fascinated at how every niche market has its journal and coterie of followers, often existing in another dimension from the rest of us.

So the Asset Management class, which has produced its own stars, like Hugh Hendry of Eclectica — the Mick Jagger of short (and long) selling — has a journal to keep its members in touch.

To most people hedge funds are so exotic they belong on another planet. They are run by a tribe of self-confessed pirates, some with a single ship, others with an entire fleet.

Hugh Hendry has become a media star, sought after by the likes of Jeff Randall on Sky, and Evan Davis on the BBC. His good humour and Blarney-stoned eloquence, with an irresistible touch of the unexpected, puts him in the top bracket of media performers from the much-depleted ranks of the hedgies.

Will they survive the depression? Just as the world needs hyenas and vultures to clear up carrion, and bacteria to consume dead and dying bodies, I suspect they will.

You have to see it in the round.

Is the eurozone about to break up? Don’t rule it out.

There’s a lot of conflicting talk around at the moment. The Germans are adamantly opposed to taking on liability for the debts of the less disciplined members — the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain; Emerald Club Med, one might say.

Yet the German Finance Minister has not ruled out a rescue in the last resort. German voters might not take kindly to it though, and there are elections in September.

Now the European Investment Bank (EIB) is being touted as the issuer of new Euro bonds to shore up these profligate countries. The unbending Maastricht Treaty rules this area, of course, but a little matter of law never stopped the Commission bending the rules in the past. The European Stability Pact was a classic example.

Whatever happens next will prove that the present one-size-fits-all system can never survive without either much more beef behind it, or a smaller membership.

At the end of this depression, I expect the eurozone will look very different and carry much less weight in the world.

Quote of the Week

“England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen.” George Orwell

John Evans

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As a self-appointed member of that exotic species named “internet entrepreneurs”, I was interested in Fraser Nelson’s article in the current issue of The Spectator.

The summary of the piece states: “… the Conservatives are taking their cue from the West Coast of America: the land of Google, Stanford University and venture capital. They want to rebuild Britain in California’s image: dynamic, high-tech, green and ‘family-friendly’.”

That is a good idea … up to a point.

California has its exhilarating high points for sure. It also embraces deep pits of madness. As a melting-pot State with many right-on East Coast emigres, plus millions of Hispanics up from the South, mostly illegal, it lacks the sense of cohesion Britain once had, and still does in some parts of the country.

California has an annual income roughly the same as the UK’s. Recently it was said to be overtaking Britain and would soon be the world’s fourth largest economy, taken by itself. We won’t know if that’s really true until the dust settles from the current depression.

On this side of the duck pond, we tend to see only two aspects of the State: Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Both conjure up images of starlets on roller skates, propelling themselves along wide pavements against a background of endless sun, sea and sand to the sound of the ululating Beach Boys.

We blank out the forest fires, the frequent earthquakes, the smogs, boot to bumper car jams, crime, and the cute chaos of the place. It’s a young person’s environment, maddeningly obtuse about lots of things, always eager to jump on any passing whimsy that offers a new thrill.

Incubator of the future, yes, but also progenitor of a million tried and rejected poppycock schemes. The Brits who wash up there are usually attention seekers, like actors, singers and graduates of Performing Arts schools.

California is also hard work. Michael Arrington, who built up TechCrunch from nothing, has had a series of health problems from overwork, including exhaustion, nervous and heart complaints. He recently received serious death threats and was spat on in a public place, requiring a month off work.

TechCrunch.com is a blog-based content network that evaluates startup enterprises and their products. It’s no place for the fainthearted apparently.

Duncan Riley, who originated The Blog Herald from a quiet corner of Western Australia, graduated to TechCrunch and spent some time in the Valley. His observations on the crazy greed of the place, its supercharged way of life and general attrition against human health and sanity, contributed to my own decision not to move there at the height of the boom.

And yet the lessons of the Valley and of the Californian and Seattle-based tech scenes can be learnt and imported by a new Tory administration.

Britain needs to manufacture more, especially high tech equipment and derivatives. Silicon Valley specializes largely in internet-based software and services, but it doesn’t make the hardware. The metal and plastic bits are cheaper to produce and assemble in the Far East, and that will remain so in the future.

The operating software, which the Valley does so well, is deferred design and therefore part of the manufacturing process. No-one will buy a generalist box of tricks with no room for applications.

There is also a third level in the making of computer technology, that of application writing — the creative bit. The operating software contains a series of APIs (application programming interfaces) which allow outside creators (programmers) to add products and services to the basic design.

Increasingly, these services are being dangled from “the cloud”, a magical place in cyberspace where software applications and APIs reside for public use. Software on hard drives is going rapidly out of fashion at the punchy end of the market.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising any proposer of academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to mimic West Coast Silicon Valley or Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train its own software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East.

Globalization will take a long time to recover from its recent catastrophic fall from grace. We need to look carefully at ourselves and incubate the future here at home. Empire building abroad can wait … for now.

John Evans

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