In today’s newsletter:
Cambridge and the incentive problem
Why Britain can’t build a railway
The AI doomers are wrong about maths
Daniel Freeman is the Managing Editor and Deputy Editorial Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs
Jason Arday, who resigned as professor of the sociology of education at Cambridge on Wednesday amid accusations of extensive plagiarism, is undoubtedly an extraordinary person.
He might or might not have run 600 miles in six days to raise money for charity, been twice chased through the quadrangles of Cambridge by a masked, knife-wielding racist, or been hailed as a man of destiny by a Brazilian prophetess. But Arday has certainly made a story about academic standards and ethics dominate the news cycle for over a week, which is an achievement in itself.
Of course, we shouldn’t be too impressed. The story is not really about him but about a failure of institutions and leadership. How was it that serious allegations of academic fraud were ignored for so long? Why did the Education Faculty and Jesus College, Cambridge insist there was no case to answer? Why were journalists investigating the allegations essentially told to back off by the police?
As is so often the case this is a story that comes back to incentives.
Profit-seeking bodies can of course be taken in by charlatans and fantasists. But the profit motive provides an incentive for firms to sniff out people who are not all they claim to be.
The lack of a clear service to be delivered leaves not-for-profit organisations like charities and universities peculiarly vulnerable to pursuing the ideological hobbyhorses or personal whims of their leadership at the expense of higher goals like academic rigour, the pursuit of truth or high-quality education.
This is not a modern problem. Adam Smith had a low opinion of the quality of teaching at Oxford and Cambridge (which, until the 1820s, were England’s only two universities) which he believed had been ruined by misaligned incentives. In The Wealth of Nations, he observed that university professors in England relied on stipends paid from substantial college endowments, rather than fees from students, resulting in indifferent teaching. Smith claimed that at Oxford:
[T]he greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.
None of this is to say that charitable bodies should be converted en masse into for-profit enterprises. But the price of a non-profit structure is constant vigilance. And the stakes are high. In Cambridge’s case a reputation for academic rigour built up over centuries can be seriously dented in a few years.
Oversight bodies such as college boards of trustees must have the power, information and willingness to restrain agents gone rogue. If leadership undermines the attributes that make an organisation great in the first place, whether in pursuit of feel-good politics or personal aggrandisement, it is essential there is a culture within an organisation that allows those within it to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
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IEA Podcast: Director General Lord Hannan is joined by Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz and Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon to discuss whether America is really richer than Britain, the Government's "social value" procurement rules, and the Cambridge academic misconduct scandal, IEA YouTube
This week on Economic Affairs
News and Views from the IEA
Infrastructure
Britain spends as much on infrastructure as its peers, but gets measurably less: HS2 Phase 1, at roughly £470 million per route-kilometre, is the most expensive high-speed railway in any international database
British construction productivity fell by 0.6% a year between 1997 and 2019, while the wider economy grew by 2.8%
Every French city over 150,000 people has a tram, light rail or metro; around 30 British towns and cities of comparable size have none
Cancelling the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2 will have forgone benefits worth £0.6 to £1.3 billion a year to Greater Manchester alone
New publication from the IEA by Senior Economist Valentin Boboc sets out how planning and procurement failures have driven Britain’s Great Stagnation
The AI doomers are wrong about maths. Valentin Boboc, the IEA’s Senior Economist, writes in CapX on the row over AI’s recent mathematical breakthroughs.
Boboc’s piece follows two milestones that split opinion online: an Anthropic mathematician’s use of AI to find a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, a problem dating back to 1939, and OpenAI’s Astra model solving 10 problems in maths and computer science that had gone unsolved for at least a decade. He argues that academics dismissing the work as crude “slop” are missing the point, since both results were independently checked by peers and verification software.
Boboc’s view is that AI is simply a tool that amplifies the skill of whoever wields it, in the same way early tools boosted the output of a skilled hunter rather than an unskilled one. He notes that non-mathematicians who tried to copy the feat mostly produced incorrect results, while trained mathematicians achieved genuine breakthroughs, and points to evidence that entry-level jobs are growing fastest at firms adopting AI most aggressively, against the fear that the technology simply replaces people.
Dr Valentin Boboc, Senior Economist at the IEA, writes: “AI is a tool, in the sense that it is an extension of its user.”
Why Does It Cost Britain Four Times More to Build a Railway? Daniel Freeman interviews Valentin Boboc on his Great Stagnation chapter on Britain's infrastructure crisis, IEA YouTube
Kristian Niemietz revisits the World Bank's 1994 pension reform blueprint at the Gottfried von Haberler Conference:
The cost of Stage 1 of HS2 at current prices is, I believe, around £100bn; viz the quote in the video.