If you haven't already come across it, TED is a wonderful selection of speeches and talks which are incredibly interesting. If you have some spare time and want to use your grey matter I strongly recommend heading over to the TED Youtube Channel to browse some of the videos, or even to their fantastic site.
My favourite talk today is this one below, which pleases me both by worshiping one of the greatest (or certainly most useful) thinkers of all time, Adam Smith, and also empirically proving how costly theocracy is for any given society. Both points of view I strongly endorse.
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Monday, 26 September 2011
Saturday, 3 September 2011
Housing, planning blah blah blah
Seeing as one of my 'hot topics' is the restrictions on new house building and the problems this creates, the current public debate on such matters meant I couldn't help a quick post.
Finally I am reading some articles which articulate my view. I have of course always supported more development on the grounds of creating growth, allowing young people to buy a home, and simply because not to develop more would mean to be static and in fact decline.
A couple of choice quotes from Phillip Collins in The Times yesterday give some perspective.
"Only 10% of this country is developed and close to half of that is accounted for by gardens. On this crazily crowded island we have built houses on only 1.1% of the land. Sheep and cows have more room to live in than we do. Roads are choking up 2.2% of land, taking up less space than reservoirs."
and on productivity "agriculture as an industry produces 0.5% of GDP. Not a huge return on 72% of the land mass"
I still think that our national obsession with protecting 'the green fields' is a collective form of nimby-ism. Phillip Collins also recounts a meeting he chaired on mobile phone masts, another nimby no no. At the meeting, which was packed out, he asked all those present with a mobile phone to hold it up, which of course was everyone. Before they could take their arms down he asked them to keep their arms up if they were in favour of new mobile phone masts, and of course they all fell. He says "they wanted to progress and yet also to conserve and they didn't want to choose between the two. Yet sometimes you have to."
This brings me nicely on to this article which really hits the nail on the head. Perhaps what we are actually suffering from is a great lack of imagination. People see buildings and roads they don't like the look of and oppose development thereafter. Wouldn't it be so much better if instead they accepted progress and focused on making new development as pleasing to others as it is useful it is to it's owners.
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Finally I am reading some articles which articulate my view. I have of course always supported more development on the grounds of creating growth, allowing young people to buy a home, and simply because not to develop more would mean to be static and in fact decline.
A couple of choice quotes from Phillip Collins in The Times yesterday give some perspective.
"Only 10% of this country is developed and close to half of that is accounted for by gardens. On this crazily crowded island we have built houses on only 1.1% of the land. Sheep and cows have more room to live in than we do. Roads are choking up 2.2% of land, taking up less space than reservoirs."
and on productivity "agriculture as an industry produces 0.5% of GDP. Not a huge return on 72% of the land mass"
I still think that our national obsession with protecting 'the green fields' is a collective form of nimby-ism. Phillip Collins also recounts a meeting he chaired on mobile phone masts, another nimby no no. At the meeting, which was packed out, he asked all those present with a mobile phone to hold it up, which of course was everyone. Before they could take their arms down he asked them to keep their arms up if they were in favour of new mobile phone masts, and of course they all fell. He says "they wanted to progress and yet also to conserve and they didn't want to choose between the two. Yet sometimes you have to."
This brings me nicely on to this article which really hits the nail on the head. Perhaps what we are actually suffering from is a great lack of imagination. People see buildings and roads they don't like the look of and oppose development thereafter. Wouldn't it be so much better if instead they accepted progress and focused on making new development as pleasing to others as it is useful it is to it's owners.
For the good of rural life, we must build houses in the English countryside
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