A. The Philosophical Principle
Let’s consider some most basic, most fundamental principles.
What is politics and government? It should just concern the management and governance of society as a whole. In a free society, it should only affect individual people insofar as their behaviour affects other people.
What does life, a human life consist of? Obviously a body, usually consciousness but mostly it is the time between life and death. Human life is time limited. Human time is both the background on which all human life is lived and our most precious resource. The most important ‘freedom’ is for people so far as practicable (if it does not damage the freedom of others more than it enhances one’s own freedom) to spend as much of their limited lifetime living as they wish rather than as others wish.
That is the fundamental basis of the politics of freedom and the politics of human time that I am quite innovatively setting out here.
True, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) had said, ‘There is one kind of robber the law does not strike, and who steals what is most precious to men: time’. Yet Napoleon never developed this great insight into a political philosophy as I am doing. Amazingly no philosopher, let alone political creed I know of has thought or worked things out thoroughly in these terms before.
That is amazing, partly because ‘freedom’ has long been a key concept in political philosophy. It is in particular a foundational principle, indeed the foundational principle, of the Unites States of America. Many Americans proclaim they are ‘proud to be American because I know I am free.’ America, the leading, most powerful, most technologically advanced country in our world has long been the champion of freedom, personal freedom and has often fought to bring or maintain ‘freedom’ in other countries.’ Western Europe also, albeit usually with less emphasis, has embraced human freedom. Political libertarians, notably those on the ‘libertarian right’ emphasise above all else personal freedom. (Is there, can there be, a libertarian left since left-wing politics so often restricts or even deprives people of the freedom to make money, and thereby economic freedom?) I consider my political viewpoint to be of the ‘libertarian right’, prioritising the freedom of people in general to live life as much as possible (within, very importantly, the realities of our world) as they wish to do so.
So one might have supposed people, at least political theorists (and there are many academic political theorists as well as practising politicians) would have pondered about freedom, personal freedom, much more carefully than is apparently the case. What in this context seems to have escaped their notice is human life is intimately related to human time. Furthermore the two chief contexts within which human life is lived are our physical world, including most crucially our own human natures (more of that in future articles) which necessarily restricts somewhat human freedom of action and human time. Indeed I say as much of human time and personal freedom over human time as possible should be salvaged from the restrictive (but actually because of improving human technology progressively less restrictive) context of our world in which we necessarily live. Unfortunately not only has the ‘context of our world’ (a context which militates enormously against left-wing politics) escaped the notice of most political theorists, but so also has the context of the limited time in which each human life is lived. Therefore although economic or financial costs have sometimes been considered, generally in a one-dimensional way, often excluding calculated benefits, the dimension of time which is in definitively limited supply in each human life has generally been overlooked.
So the first point of originality here is to consider and relate human time to human freedom in a very definite way. This is original, at least in political thought, even though the ordinary person in the street tends to divide his or her life into ‘worktime’ and ‘freetime’ – that is embryonically a useful concept though it has not been meaningfully translated into politics, certainly not in a very practical way (as I am trying to do).
B. The Innovative Human Time Calculus.
The second innovative doctrine I am putting forward is human time is measurable enough to be used as a guide and signpost to rational politics and a politics of human freedom. Furthermore both sides of many equations are measurable and comparable in the same terms, the same currency, the terms of human time. The impacts of most actions of governance, as both expenditure and gains (or freeing) in terms of human time are measurable, at least approximately measurable. This is a principle way beyond what other political theorists have stated.
A further (third) innovation I am making is stating that in calculating human time those calculations should generally include both paid human time (which accountants may very roughly calculate) and unpaid human time. Though unpaid time is seldom calculated, it is still very much human time and very important in terms of human freedom.
This measurability on the impacts upon human time, both in terms of expenditure of and benefits to human time can become a calculus of human time. Most activities and the impacts of much legislation are directly calculable in terms of human time.
The general principle I propose is that if the total aggregated costs in human time are less than the benefits in human time that activity is generally sensible (subject to not impinging too much upon the personal freedom of people) but if the total costs exceed the benefits in human time that is harmful. Such harmful activities should either be abandoned or modified until the time benefits exceed the time costs.
Historically speaking, while human technology has advanced hugely, enabling people to live far more comfortable lives than in past ages, the misgovernance of societies in wasting those advances by wasting ever more human time (the most precious asset in our lives) is truly appalling. As much, if not more than anything else, it is this absurdity and affront to human freedom, this product of misgovernance that I am seeking to alleviate (if not eliminate) as a self-proclaimed guru of rational politics.
C. Devalued And Enhanced Human Time.
However to enunciate a fourth novel principle and a practical principle is that in doing our calculations of human time, it would be wrong only to calculate in a quantitative way rather than in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Put at its simplest as an example human time spent sleeping is not as qualitatively valuable as human time spent awake, especially in terms of human freedom. Furthermore the hours spent in infancy don’t count for that much. Disability, depending on the disability, may devalue life. Obviously such calculations are approximate but they should be considered.
A particularly relevant calculation is that though people may on average live for about seven hundred thousand hours, the hours in one’s paid working life probably only amount to about sixty thousand hours. So about sixty thousand hours is on average an entire working life or useful professional life for the average person. By way of comparison the average person would probably spend over 200,000 hours in sleeping, around 60,000 hours in eating or preparing food, around 30,000 hours in dressing and personal functions, more than 30,000 hours in travelling. After infancy, education and illness this leaves well under 200,000 hours in a lifetime for potentially active and meaningful free time – that is very valuable! Also very valuable is free time that can be rescued from redundant worktime or to an extent from formal education, especially adult education. Similarly we will be considering counterproductive or potentially counterproductive (in terms of human time) regulations here but many other things such as unnecessary bureaucracy should also be looked into.
I also point out that as one may (to varying degrees) think of other things while working, travelling or eating, not all such human time is a total write off in terms of human time although it is certainly very devalued time. In terms of ‘enhanced time’ I am thinking particularly of the time devoted to an activity, especially a work related activity by somebody with special expertise (whether naturally endowed or more often acquired via ‘learning’) that makes such time a particularly valuable resource for human society.
Anyhow I will go some way towards illustrating what I mean in the approximately worked examples I give later in this article.
D. Use Of Human Time Calculus.
‘The human time calculus’ can and should be applied to most governance activity in society, such as education, health services, even law and order. It is a technique I am originating that is, or rather should become fundamental to any rational way of doing politics in future, not merely in respect to libertarian politics but even with respect to other types of politics.
I will return to the abovementioned topics in future communications. However the most direct and easiest application is with regulations concerning health and safety. That is because health and safety is most directly concerned with spending human time to take precautions against losing human time through deaths and injuries. So that is the simplest, most direct sphere in which one can at least approximately work out human time spent in comparison to human time conserved. So one can work out here whether or not more human time is spent in the effort to conserve human time than is actually saved (or conserved) by such measures. So one can calculate (rather than just ’emote’ as as all too often happens nowadays) whether any actual or proposed safety measures are effective or counterproductive in terms of the very thing people are ultimately trying to preserve which is human time.
I give a few very roughly worked out examples concerning the effectiveness or more often counterproductiveness of health and safety regulations in the next section.
E. The Human Time Cost/Benefit Analysis Of Some Regulations.
The general principle is if the overall costs in human time (paid and unpaid human time) of the imposition of a law or regulation exceed the benefits in saving or preserving human time effected by that regulation then that regulation should be abandoned as counter-productive or at least modified to the point where its human time benefits exceed its human time costs.
(i) Vehicle Safety Testing
I take as my first illustration an example of regulation that impacts upon many millions of people, ‘vehicle safety inspections’ (for personal automobiles).
In general while advancing technology has made vehicles ever safer and less polluting, governments, especially in Europe, have legislated for ever more wideranging periodic vehicle safety testing. Yet societies made do without such vehicle safety testing before the nineteen sixties and still do so now in the case of vehicles more than 40 or 50 years old. Even now some American and Australian states do not require vehicle testing and apparently a couple (Kentucky and Minnesota) have abolished periodic vehicle inspections. Elsewhere some places require vehicle testing every year while some require it every second year, some after a vehicle is 3 years old and some after 6 years old; yet some only require vehicle testing when a vehicle is sold on. Practically everywhere vehicles have by law to be ‘roadworthy’ which is reasonable enough but why the extra testing?
Is there any statistical data to show that vehicles that are only tested every once every two years cause significantly more injuries than vehicles that are tested annually or indeed cause significantly fewer injuries than those that are not tested at all? Does practically nobody (which I suspect) bother with the real costs of vehicle testing?
There is an economic cost in paying for the tests and extra vehicle journeys and road mileage to get vehicles tested. Yet the main cost is in the deprivation of human time and human freedom to do as one wishes with one’s time. The time involved is mainly both the paid human time of the mechanics doing the testing and the unpaid human time of vehicle owners. Vehicle owners must take their vehicle in for testing, have their lives disrupted while their vehicle is unavailable and spend time in collecting and driving away their vehicle as well as in administration for this. When all this time is multiplied by the number of vehicle tests done in a country it is massive. Is that matched by human time saved through injuries and deaths avoided by tested compared to untested vehicles? Even if that were so, is tripling the time spent on testing by having annual instead of three yearly tests justified in terms of human time saved by non-injuries?
Although it is slightly complex, a direct comparison can be made between human time spent on vehicle testing and human time preserved by vehicle testing. Certainly examples exist of places where vehicle testing is frequently done, less frequently done and not done at all. Those comparisons can and should be made. Yet I suspect they are not done at all and certainly not used in political decision making on having or not having (or the extent of) compulsory vehicle condition testing. Indeed I suspect calculations, certainly not human time cost/benefit calculations, are decisive of virtually nothing in political governance.
Unfortunately, I don’t personally have sufficient data available to do the actual calculations for vehicle testing. I have managed to find out that mechanical failures are responsible for only about two per cent of accidents in Western countries (less than the over 10% of accidents attributable to road conditions). So now just to show (more or less) in principle how it should be done, I am using partly hypothetical figures which are something of an educated guess to work out its rough, albeit hypothetical, cost effectiveness. However what this will do is show roughly how in principle such calculations should be done.
Rough Calculation re Human Time Balance Of Vehicle Testing
Number of Vehicle Tests Done In A Country In A Year : 30 million (Annual Testing)
Human Time Cost Of Testing Estimated Weighted Man Hours
Customers a)Time expended in taking and taking away vehicles
to be tested 1.5 hours each (Great concentration –
leisure time enhanced by 1.5) 67,500,000
b) Time expended in waiting- 1 hour each (Little
concentration, non-enhanced time) 30,000,000
c) Time expended in administration -20 minutes each
(making appointments, paying-time enhanced by 1.5) 15,000,000
d) Time in disruption without vehicle. Average 25 hours (time devalued by 10%) 75,000,000
Administration a) Organising and bill for work 15 minutes garage
admin and 15 minutes accounts (enhanced by 2 forwork time) 15,000,000
b) Overheads in building and maintaining garage and
equipment, say 30 minutes per test (non-enhanced time) 15,000,000
Mechanics a) Time to do checks 1 hour (enhanced work time by 2,
skilled but can daydream) 60,000,000
Petrol/Materials Used In Process – say 20 minutes man hour equivalents 10,000,000
TOTAL COSTS – Time 302,500,000 man hours
– Money (say 100$ U.S. each) $3,000,000,000 U.S.
Human Time Preserved By Vehicle Testing Estimated Weighted Man Hours
Deaths Prevented: 30 X half lives (half already lived) 10,500,000
Medium Injuries (excluding very minor walk-away injuries): 300
(= 1,000 hours recovery each, time 50% devalued) 150,000
Serious Life Changing Permanent Injuries: 30 (x half lives 40% devalued) 4,200,000
Medical Services: 360 (average 100 hours each, enhanced by 4 i.e. work
time by 2 + skill weighted X 2) 144,000
Insurance, Enquiries and Administration and Car Repairs: (average 200
hours serious/fatal; 50 hours medium -work x 2 + skill 50% enhanced) 81,000
Inconvenience To Others: Workplace; hospital visits etc.;(100 hours each
enhanced by 50%) 54,000
TOTAL BENEFITS (Time conserved due to accident prevention) 15,129,000 man hours
I am assuming (accurately for the United Kingdom) there are around 1,500 road deaths a year of which 30 (2%) are caused by mechanical vehicle failure and optimistically a similar number (30) of road deaths are prevented by compulsory annual vehicle testing. However as the 30 road deaths are despite annual vehicle testing, it is a fair assumption that many mechanical failures are rather sudden and so unpreventable by frequent vehicle testing. So the estimate of 30 annual deaths prevented by vehicle testing is probably too high and does not seem to be validated by at least crude comparisons of road casualties as between U.S. states that have and do not have periodic compulsory road vehicle testing. I have also generously failed to take account of the fact that if the potentially seriously injured and dead do not suffer from health failure due to road accidents, they would eventually succumb to other health failures. They would indeed consume society’s resources in pensions in most cases and then in health care for other ailments. So the costs to society (albeit not the individual casualties) of road accidents is somewhat exaggerated, but I am not using that consideration to reduce the benefits of vehicle testing here.
So on my calculation which is on the generous side in relation to the principle of compulsory vehicle testing, in a medium sized country over 300 million man hours are being consumed by annual vehicle testing but only about 15 million man hours of human time are conserved by it. That is vehicle testing is in human time costing about twenty man hours of human lifetime for every man hour of lifetime preserved by it – outrageous! Or indeed in financial terms it is costing about one hundred million U.S. dollars for every half life saved by it – or two hundred million dollars for each life saved! That is an absolutely outrageous cost even if reduced somewhat by taking account of other injury prevention!
However, let us adjust these estimated figures to what they might be if testing was required just once every three years instead of every year. The human time costs would (approximately) be one third, and say 60% of the lives and injuries that might be saved by annual testing could still be saved if the testing was once every three year. Then in my estimated example 101 million human time hours would be the cost in man hours but just over 9 million man hours would be saved by such testing. That is still over eleven man hours spent (or wasted) for every man hour saved by it. So it would still be a horrendous waste of human time, human lifetime to have periodic vehicle testing imposed by law.
Obviously, these figures would have to be assembled (via evidence wherever possible) and worked out far more carefully than I have been able to do. Yet I have at least here illustrated the principle of calculating and judging the benefits v costs of regulations in rational human terms.
So let’s go on to other examples.
(ii) Fire And Fire Precautions
Animals stampede at forest fires and similarly fire tends to cause hysteria, certainly psychological hysteria, among humans. That means rationality concerning fires goes out of the window. Certainly in former ages fires were a huge peril for cities. Ancient Rome was substantially burned down in 64 A.D. and The Great Fire of London destroyed much of London in 1666. When houses were almost all made of wood and the streets were very narrow, towns and cities were at serious risk of being burned down if a fire caught hold. Even then palaces which were much more substantially built amid spacious grounds seldom caught fire when fires destroyed other buildings in the city. Nowadays roads are much wider and most buildings are constructed of brick or stone which are extremely fire resistant. So whole cities just do not burn down as in the past even if the occasional individual building may be ruined by fire. However human psychological hysteria about fires survives unabated and is easily exploited by interest groups such as fire brigades and assorted health and safety functionaries.
Indeed in recent times fire precautions and fire regulations have proved on the whole not merely ineffective but absolutely counter-productive, causing far more harm than good to people. For example it was discovered that asbestos is a wonderful material for holding back and therefore protecting against fire and supposedly for preventing deaths by fire. So for decades it came to be advised or required that new buildings and retrofitted old buildings should be fitted with asbestos to protect against fire. That probably saved a relatively small number of lives from death from fire, maybe a few dozen a year in Britain which was not really enough to justify the human time and cost of fitting the asbestos ‘protection’ in the first place. Unfortunately mania overrides rational calculation. However it was found that when asbestos decays or is disturbed it emits into the air thin, fibrous, floating crystals (fibrils) that when inhaled by people can set off mesothelioma decades later which causes a slow, extremely painful death to the innocent victim. Asbestos in Britain is now responsible for about 3,000 painful deaths each year (about ten times the deaths from all actual British fire deaths each year). This is killing about one hundred times as many people as were ever saved by this human time-consuming fitting of asbestos in the first place. (Nevertheless, a generation after this substance, asbestos was proved to be very dangerous and counter-productive and was accordingly banned from further use in Britain, it is still being manufactured and used extensively in many other countries).
Asbestos is not even an isolated example of supposed ‘fire prevention’ measures causing far more deaths than they are saving. A much more inexcusable example are the measures taken in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire in London, United Kingdom. These are inexcusable because the damage of these measures was foreseeable and to an extent calculable unlike the deadly side effects of asbestos, at least in the early days (though asbestos continued to be used for ‘fire prevention’ long after its deadly side effects were becoming apparent). Grenfell Tower was a tower block that caught alight in 2017 with the fire spreading rapidly via the cladding at the sides of the building which was not fully fire resistant, killing over 70 people. However it was a freak accident distorting the average of just four fire deaths a year in all the thousands of high rise buildings in Britain. It was discovered that there are thousands of tower blocks in Britain and clearly many thousands more elsewhere fitted with a slightly cheaper not fully fire resistant cladding rather than fully fire resistant cladding. In Britain but not elsewhere all such buildings were after the Grenfell Tower fire declared especially dangerous and needing to be retrofitted with fully fire resistant cladding and in the meantime protected with special measures. Those special measures were usually ‘a waking watch’ of security guards (in addition to the normal mechanical fire alarms) looking out for and guarding against fires in those buildings twenty four hours a day, to be paid for by the unfortunate owners of those flats. This is despite the fact that in the several thousand such tower blocks in Britain there had not previously been such fires and in the now seven years since the Grenfell fire there have been no such fatalities from inadequately fire resistant cladding in Britain and presumably not from those abroad either. No matter- replacement of insufficiently fire resistant cladding and ‘waking watches’ are deemed necessary to guard against not actual deaths, but the mere slight risk of fire deaths. So no real benefits but massive costs, costs resulting not just in massive losses of human time but also costs in cramping lifestyles, widespread financial misery and consequently many, many premature illnesses and deaths.
So let us attempt to very roughly calculate the annual costs of this British over-reaction to the freak disaster at Grenfell Tower: Weighted Man Hours:
– Remedial Works (£5 billion – 0.25 billion work hours x 2 work enhancement) 500,000,000
– Interim Waking Watches – 3,000 extra guards on watch all the time (+ 50% work
enhancement – guards may read, sleep, listen to media; daydream etc) 45,000,000
– Disruption To Lives (1 million people cannot sell their flats, move to an out of area
job & suffer economic distress and anxiety – devaluation of 5% to lives) 450,000,000
– Surplus Deaths (say 200 from heart attacks, cancer, suicide etc.;) 70,000,000
-Surplus Illnesses (say 20,000 anxiety, non-fatal physical illnesses – 33% devaluation) 60,000,000
TOTAL COST IN MAN HOURS 1,125,000,000
(This is the equivalent in time to about to about 1,600 full lives lost or 3,200 half lives or 18,000 working lives lost each year in Britain for many years after the Grenfell Tower fire)
In practice there is almost certainly going to be no benefit as nothing serious is likely to happen (like it has not happened elsewhere in the world where there is ‘defective’ cladding) without these ‘safety’ precautions. Even if another full blown Grenfell Tower type disaster did happen with about 70 deaths that would cost about 25 million man hours (70 x half lives) in human lives lost and maybe around another 25 million man hours in other consequential costs. That would be about one twenty second of the cost in human time in trying to prevent another freak accident (to say nothing of the estimated 200 deaths a year, compared to 70 deaths brought about by the sheer pressures those preventative measures are causing for people)! However, statistically speaking what really should be done rather than say such a disaster would not happen again is to estimate the chances of it happening again that are prevented by these precautions. To rate that at its highest and without taking into account the improved fire brigade procedures and technology (e.g. smoke hoods) that has come on stream since Grenfell Tower, the (probably exaggerated) chance of a repetition in Britain absent these precautions might be estimated at 5% per year. In that case the notional benefit of the cost of 1,125,000,000 man hours is two and a half million man hours, making the precautionary cost exceed the calculated benefit by about 450 to 1. What innumeracy to expend 450 hours in human time for each hour in human time one is likely to save! What insanity! The sane response would have been to treat the Grenfell Tower Fire as the freak accident it so evidently was. Therefore society should not have incurred extra human time costs in extra precautions against further such freak accidents (unless it could be shown by many more similarly fatal such accidents somewhere in the world that it was not a freak accident. That manifestly has not been happening!).
So I have taken an extreme example of useless, indeed counter-productive (in human time cost) fire precautions caused by an irrational, emotive panic rather than by rational calculation. Perhaps we should also look at more ‘mundane’ fire precautions. Let us consider installing electrical fire zone panels in buildings which are additional to smoke alarms and are standard in some countries for medium sized and large buildings. I believe the latest thinking is that at least in medium sized buildings they do more harm than good. That is because when the fire brigade arrive the firemen tend to all be initially immobilised while one of them tries to fathom out from the panels the actual position of the fire instead of all instantaneously spreading out in different directions until the fire is located. So they lose vital early time while the fire builds up. Anyhow, their installation costs in both human time and money is enormous. Let’s very roughly estimate it for a medium sized country.
Fire Panels – installation of 100,000, maintenance of 2,000,000 per year. Weighted Man Hours -Cost of Installations-say average 500 man hours per panel, skilled work, enhanced by 2.5. 125,000,000
-Installation Disruption to others – say average 100 man hours per panel 10,000,000
-Checks systems are working inc travel/administration- 3 hours per year, enhanced by 2 12,000,000
ANNUAL COST TOTAL IN MAN HOURS 147,000,000
Benefits: Say the systems save 5 lives per year beyond other fire precautions (such as
fire doors, fire fighting equipment, smoke alarms),probably an over-estimate
– 5 half lives saved annually 1,750,000
– Destruction to property and injuries prevented, say 1,750,000
TOTAL ANNUAL BENEFIT IN MAN HOURS 3,500,000
So, let alone the money one is expending (or wasting) this is estimated to cost 147 million man hours to save 3.5 million man hours (and more likely as the savings are probably very exaggerated here, just one million man hours). That is over 40 man hours of human freedom lost for each hour of human freedom salvaged (or gained). How preposterous! Put differently one is expending the whole output of over two hundred people’s (skilled people at that) working lives’ labour for each life (or rather half life as the potential victims will on average have already lived half their life) saved. So over 400 people must toil at work all their working lives just to save one person’s life – that is regulatory nonsense. Even the health service wouldn’t contemplate employing 400 doctors for their whole working life just to keep one baby alive for a lifetime! Yet such is the human mania about fire that the equivalent to that is the normal demand of fire brigades’ fire safety officers and that is emotively supported by the general public in its ignorance and irrationality! Let’s turn aghast elsewhere, or rather to yet another regulatory madness.
(iii) Electricity Safety Regulations
I apologise for basing my examples on the United Kingdom but I live in Britain and am most familiar with it. Yet I think things are not that much different (indeed often worse) in other Western countries. The principles I am enunciating apply worldwide (even if the particular figures involved are different).
Britain was relatively slow to introduce compulsory electricity testing in large part because the fatalities and I suppose the serious injuries from faulty electrics were so very low. After initial resistance from Ministers and, I suspect, civil servants, the electricity interest groups (that is mainly the ‘professional’ bodies representing electricians and probably manufacturers of electrical equipment) eventually found civil servants and politicians dumb enough to cave in to their self-interested lobbying and scaremongering. In reality the idea of these electrical trade associations was both to force most electricians into their membership (most people doing electrical work had not been members) and then exploit the counter-productive (in human time terms) regulations so that their member electricians could charge and make fortunes. The trade body for gas engineers had previously succeeded in this technique. So the electrical trade bodies first engineered the introduction of annual Portable Appliance Tests. This was an expensive and counter-productive (in human time) innovation. However it was not much good for qualified electricians as the appliances tested, in say hotels were often so cheap that electricians couldn’t charge their normal fortunes for call-out charges and hourly rates. So a sort of species of sub-electricians who were not fully trained electricians went into business to do such testing. So later on the electricians’ associations managed to hoodwink the government into introducing compulsory Electrical Installation Condition Reports for all privately rented (not ‘socially’ rented nor owner occupied) homes. They had pretended in evidence to government that such testing would be very cheap, done at a cost which in actual fact is a small fraction of what electricians would in practice charge. They also neglected to mention that this testing would give electricians enormous discretion to insist on lots of expensive ‘remedial’ work, including sometimes full house rewiring, not otherwise required (not to mention countless lesser works) to pass their installation testing. The testing also mandated them to (in probably most cases) to change the ‘consumer unit’ at around 400 American dollars a time to the most modern metallic ones. That was easily and commonly done as previous ‘electrical standards’ had insisted upon a plastic one, itself replacing the previous metallic consumer units! The electrical lobbyists had previously overlooked when they had insisted (obviously on supposed grounds of ‘safety’) plastic replace metal that plastic was actually worse than metal because plastic was more liable to burn than metal! A very expensive mistake, not for electricians who have profited greatly from their industry ‘experts” own mistake and negligent lobbying but for the put-upon house owners! The worst of it is that electrical faults in homes (probably excluding electrical fires which are sometimes arson and are protected against by fire regulations and anyhow are sudden and not readily preventable by electrical regulations) were only killing about five people a year in Britain. I suspect among those few are electricians and people undertaking maintenance work. Five people are about the same as the people being killed in Britain by sheep each year and one thirtieth of those dying from falling out of bed each year! So the number of deaths of people living in privately rented homes from all causes relating to electrical faults was about one per year out of around five million households. I take these figures from the governmental figures quoted in DIY not Forums – internet 28 January 2019 article John W2 which also helpfully stated, ‘No matter how draconian a system “accidents (and negligences) will always happen”, and it’s hard to see that it would /could ever get down to less than a handful of deaths per year in a population of 60 or so million’. So there isn’t much scope for death reductions by P.A.T. and E.I.C.R. testing.
Anyhow, let’s greatly exaggerate the benefit of E.I.C.R. testing in privately rented homes. Let’s imagine it can potentially save one life every three years, or rather half a life (as the fatality would occur to somebody who has on average already lived half their life), say 120,000 man hours a year. Maybe another 120,000 hours could (at a generous estimate) be saved each year from fewer injuries and less destruction to property. So that is 240,000 man hours benefit each year. E.I.C.R. testing is only required every five years. So I will divide the number of privately rented houses by five for the man hours costs figure, making one million homes to be tested.
Cost: Weighted Man Hours
– Testing : 1 hour each (skilled workman 2.5 enhancement) 2,500,000
– ‘Remedial’ Work – Rough average 4 hours each (skilled 2.5 enhancement) 10,000,000
– Administration : 15 minutes each (work enhancement x 2) 500,000
-Travel: for tests and remedial- 2 hours each (skilled 2.5 enhancement) 5,000,000
– Supply costs for ‘Remedial work’ – Estimated manpower costs 2,000,000
-Disruption to residents’ lives etc;- 8 hours (can do things while waiting) 8,000,000
ESTIMATED TOTAL MAN HOURS EQUIVALENT COST 28,000,000
Thus around 120 useful lifetime hours are being expended for each hour (of life and damage) saved. Furthermore to save one half life the full working life of about 450 skilled (mainly speciality trained electricians) are being expended – about 900 entire working lives to save one full life. Craziness!
Indeed if society was really intent on actually saving lives it would prohibit tobacco and alcohol, let alone overcoming hospital acquired infections (and other avoidable errors in hospitals), all of which have been killing not one or two people nor even one thousand people but tens of thousands of people in Britain each year. All these, tobacco, alcohol consumption and hospital acquired infections and errors can be significantly reduced with a tiny fraction of the human freedom diminishing human time expenditure (or working life nullifying) costs of electrical (and most other) regulations.
It is not the number of deaths or premature deaths that really counts in our irrationally run and governed modern Western societies but the emoting of a mass of innumerate fools!
F. Developing Napoleon Bonaparte’s Basic Insight
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), great man that he was, clearly understood the importance of human time, even if he did not elaborate on it much nor carry it through into a principle of human freedom and governance. (However it is fair to point out that time wasting bureaucracy and unnecessary regulations had hardly got going in his day and had certainly not developed into a massive human time consuming plague as now.)
One of Napoleon’s dictums was, ‘There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike and who steals what is most precious to men: time’. Quite right! Regrettably in our day and age the worst such robbers are governments, operating via idiotic laws and regulations instead of championing making as much time as practicable available for human freedom.
So Napoleon Bonaparte was very much on the right track even though to the best of my knowledge he never developed the precept about the primacy of human time much, as I am attempting to do here. It is in developing the idea of the primacy of human time for people and human freedom and in formulating a human time calculus for the use of governance that I am being original. This calculus compares total real costs in weighted human time with any benefits in terms of human time of regulations. In a rational world that actually valued human time and people’s freedom to spend their own human time as they (not others) wish, such calculations would be done and determine decisions, political decisions in society.
It is amazing that in modern Western university Philosophy departments and Political Science departments there are generally numerous staff specialising in feminism or in racial inequality but there is nobody at all who has any declared ‘interest’ in the appropriate impact of ‘time’, especially human time, on political thinking, policies and governance. This is despite this being a matter that affects all our lives instead of just part of some people’s lives. It could help if some political theorists and academics started to take an ‘interest’ in the perspective of the limited time in human life on rational governance and living!
I am campaigning to turn our politically irrational world that deprives people of freedom into a politically rational world that champions freedom for people to live their lives to the maximum practicable degree as they wish. That is true libertarianism. To achieve this I am attempting to initiate a ‘politics of human time’ so as to get policies determined according to ‘human time cost/benefit calculations’ (rather than according to irrational instincts or human emotions). That should be a cardinal basis for rational policy decisions in governance.
Geoffrey Berg – The Guru Of Rational Politics