The maths of losing discs

Is the disc error just one of those things? Something that just happens and has nothing, really, to do with politics?

Yes and then again no.

With every action taken by a state organisation there is a small chance of an error. So the Government can reasonably protest that such things are just life.

But in two ways Labour's philosophy of Government helped create this fiasco.

First they have increased the size of government. With a given probability of a mistake, the number of errors will increase the more that you do. As Chris Dillow puts it:

Government is just too big, and does too much. The state employs 5.78 million people. The law of probability means it's inevitable that some of these will be the sort of careless idiots who'll entrust a (private sector!) courier with sensitive data

Second, the probability does not stay constant. The more that you do, the less likely you are to be able to manage what you do. So the probability of an error rises with the size of government.

For years the right has used freedom arguments for smaller government. I am going to start using the discs too.

Comments

[MaryCunningham]

Well, I am going to disagree with Daniel's statement "With every action taken by a state organisation there is a small chance of an error.."

Because this was more than an error. Go back to your first course in Politics--the main duties of any government are three:

1)public order (internal safety)
2)defence of the realm (external safety)
3)final adjudicator of disputes--the legal system

Brown has lost sight of the first task of any government--providing its citizens with public order. It has also disobeyed its own laws in denying its citizens this security. How can government be an impartial adjudicator when the government itself is the guilty culprit?

The disc fiasco is not about 'competence'--however you define it and want to bet the spin doctors will busy!--but about Brown's Treasury failing in two of the three central tasks of any government.

The sooner they are out the better. They have stayed too long for any good they are doing, to misquote Cromwell.

[Simon Stephenson]

Well I think you should look at the autistic argument too. I'd suggest that there are some who believe that mediocrity of achievement is the direct and inevitable result of the eradication of autistic thought from national decision-making. We'd be of the opinion that the non-autistic majority has engineered society to conform exactly to the duality with which it's individuals build their own lives - the enormous investment of time and resource involved in the portrayal of things as being better than they actually are, combined with the construction of a reality that sets the criteria for success at such a low level that everything that is not gross negligence or incompetence is regarded as a poeitive.

Maybe we'd be better off by allowing the possibility that autistic thought may be of some value to society. After all, Ronseal is quite a popular product, because it does exactly what it says on the tin.

[Graeme Archer]

Assuming the probability of an error happening every time the government takes an action is constant:

-- if government does less, it doesn't mean the probability of an error is reduced. It means the expected number of errors reduces; but as a proportion of government activity it would remain the same. the expected utility (ie cost) of the errors would also be reduced ... though of course since the cost of what's happened in the last few days is uncalculably vast, that's perhaps a small comfort :-0).
(All other things aren't equal of course, and you're right that doing less usually means doing things of higher quality, which usually means reducing the chance of an error).

[David Moss]

ON INFANTILISATION

In this connection, may I recommend an article* written to mark John Stuart Mill's 200th birthday? May I recommend it to you and to the Prime Minister?

To whet your appetite, try this:

QUOTE
... Mill's rebellion against utilitarianism did not prevent him from writing a qualified defense of it, and his "Utilitarianism" is acknowledged today as one of the few readable accounts of a moral disorder that would have died out two centuries ago, had people not discovered that the utilitarian can excuse every crime. Lenin and Hitler were pious utilitarians, as were Stalin and Mao, as are most members of the Mafia.
UNQUOTE

And this:

QUOTE
At the time, Benthamite ways of thinking were influencing jurisprudence, and arguments based on the "general good" and the "good of society" appealed to the conservative imagination of the Victorian middle classes. It seemed right to control the forms of public worship, to forbid the expression of heretical opinions, or to criminalize adultery, for the sake of a "public morality" which exists for the general good. If individual freedom suffers, then that, according to the utilitarians, is the price we must pay.
UNQUOTE

And this:

QUOTE
According to Mill's argument, that way of thinking has everything upside down. The law does not exist to uphold majority morality against the individual, but to protect the individual against tyranny--including the "tyranny of the majority" ...

This principle has a profound significance: It is saying that the purpose of law is not to uphold the will of the majority, or to impose the will of the sovereign, but to protect the will of the individual. It is the legal expression of the "sovereignty of the individual."
UNQUOTE

The article goes on to show how Mill then went badly wrong and so, by implication, did we so that half of us have now fetched up on two CDs in the Jiffy bag of big government where we are treated as children by an appropriately-named nanny state.

* http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008396

[Southernmonkey]

To follow this argument to it's logical conclusion, let's have no government at all, then no one can make any mistakes and no one will be held responsible for anything...

Of course it is only the mistakes a government makes which generate headlines and debate. Much of the good things a government does - and the Labour government has been responsible for a great many good things over the past decade) - go largely unremarked.

Mr Cameron, of course, is familiar with Chancellors making mistakes. After all, he was advising Norman Lamont on Black Wednesday...

[Adam]

So are you trying to say that if the Inland Revenue had been privatised then there would be fewer catastophic errors? Or just that it wouldn't be the government's fault?

[Peter, Cambridge]

I have always found TNT to give excellent service and am concerned that it is being tarred as a "private company". I may have misunderstood the reports, but what is the evidence that the disks actually passed into the hands of TNT?

[William]

Increased the size of government? Sorry, Daniel, I though the main criticism from the Tories was that the efficiency-seeking merger of Revenue and Customs was to blame. Make your mind up.

[Simon Stephenson]

David Moss 15.26

It seems to me that Roger Scruton's claim of Mill's inferiority rests entirely on Scruton's assertion:-

"[Mill] never understood that wisdom is deeper and rarer than rational thought."

From this Scruton is able to build an argument that Conservative respect for custom is closer to wisdom than is Mill's dismissal of it. But nowhere does Scruton substantiate his claim that wisdom is deeper and rarer than rational thought. And, even supposing such a claim were true, he offers no supporting evidence for his claim that Mill never understood this.

Don't you agree that Scruton rather begs the question?

[Peter, London]

Staitically speaking, the only way to rule out government mistakes is for government to do nothing at all.

That would leave society in the hands of individuals and they never make mistakes do they?

[Udo]

Scenario...
terrorists get hold of disks
terrorists add info file to disk and change to look like a popular AVI film file
then they put what looks like a film file on all the popular p2p servers
within hours there will be thousands of copies of both disks distributed around the world ( with how to use instructions) on a purely random basis

probable..not sure

possible..obviously

it would destroy the world economy when no-one can trust the systems basic safety

Osama wins