Our Word is Our Weapon

Here’s Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute on the Thames Water controversy:

No doubt assorted eco-nazis and anti-capitalists will take pleasure in beating up Thames Water over the next few days. The German-owned utility has just announced a 31 percent rise in pre-tax profits to £346.5 million. As every eco-nazi and anti-capitalist knows, profits are a bad thing …

Eco-nazis? Yes, eco-nazis.

If that’s not silly enough for you, try the previous day’s post from Alister McFarquhar, which is so wilfully irrational, smug and deceitful I can only conclude it represents some ASI attempt to terminally stupidise public discourse by demonstrating how scientific language can be used to convey messages which have less than zero scientific merit:

The bad news is that every aspiring popular politician on either side of the pond has espoused carbon control as a major plank of policy. The fly in the ointment is consensus science, attacked consistently in this blog for some years … While early hard-core Marxist views on science were too crazy to gain support, various “New Marxists” came along with more subtle forms of subversion … aimed to deprivilege science, restoring it to the same plane as other belief systems … If this were simply the extravagance of a few frustrated postmodern left-leaning social scientists searching for a new justification for Marxism, it might be treated as a passing fad. But consensus on climate is embraced by some of Britain’s most illustrious scientists … The intellectual howler is compounded by the fact that there is no real consensus that man-made CO2 is the cause of measurable climate change. Indeed recent change is well within the fluctuations and trends of the past. The expected return of an ice age may be upon us any day as many forecast in the mid 20th Century. The global warming science-by-consensus is driven by the United Nations and other authorities (including private energy companies) with something to be gained via government subsidies. This “is the apotheosis of the century-long crusade to overthrow the foundations of modern science and replace them with collectivist social theories of science …

One almost has to admire the sheer shamelessness of this drivel. Almost. My question, and it’s a serious one, is: Has anyone done more to sully the reputation of Adam Smith than this bunch of vainglorious bullshitters?

It is often assumed that, as bad as the conditions in Third World slums are, the people there must be better off than their rural counterparts. Aside from the numerous dubious assumptions in that claim (that they chose to leave their land, that they have the option of going back etc), it’s also factually incorrect:

UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7 has broken new ground by showing that the urban poor suffer from an urban penalty: Slum dwellers in developing countries are as badly off if not worse off than their rural relatives…

The Report shows remarkable similarities between slums and rural areas in health, education, employment and mortality. It shows how in countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti and India, child malnutrition in slums is comparable to that of rural areas. In many Sub-Saharan African cities, children living in slums are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illnesses than rural children. Women living in slums are also more likely to contract HIV/AIDS than their rural counterparts.

And the problem’s not going away any time soon:

The report comes at a time when the world is entering a historic urban transition; in 2007, for the first time in history, the world’s urban population will exceed the rural population. Most of the world’s urban growth – 95 per cent – in the next two decades will be absorbed by cities of the developing world, which are least equipped to deal with rapid urbanization.

Conditions are worst In Sub-Saharan Africa, where over 70% of the urban population live in slums, which are growing by 5% a year. Planet of Slums is starting to look about right.

More from the State of the World’s Cities Report here.