Little bit of culture here (for once) - I managed to squeeze in quite a fruitful amount of intersting things over the weekend, including some interesting exhibitions in London. The Political Cartoon Gallery (near Goodge Street tube and UCL’s Senate House) is running an exhibition of cartoons depicting George W. Bush (plenty of Steve Bell, as you might expect). It was interesting (and amusing) and well worth the measly £1 entrance fee, especially when you compare all the different (yet familiar) caricatures of Bush - what features of his cartoonists commonly draw on, and which they don’t. Alas, there weren’t enough cartoons from America (maybe that is a good thing, considering how baffling and contrived* some American political cartoons can be); the commentary at the exhibition noted how Bush is so often depicted with Blair in British cartoons, while he never figures in American ones, even when they’re on international issues - it would have been really good if it had a wider selection of US depictions so that the viewer could see for themselves.

Just down the road from the Political Cartoon Gallery I found an absolute geek’s gem - the New London Architecture centre, if only because it has an enormous 1:1500 scale model of central and east London. It allows you not only to marvel at the sheer enormity of the city, and review new and proposed developments, but most important, you can pretend to be a giant. Photos here - the attention to detail is absolutely phenomenal (every block is cut & shaped individually) and best of all it’s free to get in.

Finally, I went to the enormously popular Three Emperors exhibition at the Royal Academy, which was rammed when I went (Saturday). It was intensely interesting, although you really do have to hire one of the audio guides (£3, on top of an £11 entrance fee - Oriental culture ain’t cheap) to get the most out of it. The audio commentary really brought the exhibition to life, particularly its discussion of the paintings and vast scrolls (think lengthy Bayeux tapestry-style narratives), and the influences of the Italian painter Giuseppe Castiglione, who was an artist in the court of all three emperors. However, that was also the exhibition’s drawback - the analysis and interpretation of the graphical artworks and paintings was first-class, but information about calligraphy, pottery, textiles and other technology was somewhat sketchier and left me wanting a little. Still, it’s well worth going to, not least because it showcases a place and time that is all too easily described as obscure, isolated and inscrutable, when it is absolutely not the case.

* Yes, I know it’s a spoof from the Onion link, but it neatly sums up my view on a lot of American political cartoons I’ve seen on the web.

As I type, BBC Radio Five Live are warming up for their coverage of tonight’s Superbowl, with all the mock enthusiasm of a Presbyterian grandmother at a gay wedding. Hearing “so tell me, which two teams are playing?” in the introduction only makes me more convinced about how little they or their audience know or care about the event.

Incidentally, the marketing men claim that over a million people in the UK watch the Superbowl, a figure which must be horseshit, not just because of American football’s minority status in this country; thanks to the time difference it’s shown late Sunday night/Monday morning and (up until this year at least) there would be no pubs open to show it. Where do they get these figures from?

Yesterday Rob Newman wrote in The Guardian about the unsustainability of capitalism and how we’re all doomed. Predictably, Justin takes one stance and Tim Worstall the other, which has led to some squabbling in the comment sections. What this argument comes down to is disagreement over what capitalism is - is it equivalent to free markets, is it inherently unsustainable (not just on a micro, individual market level but a macro, aggregate level as well). All interesting questions, in their own way.

Unfortunately, all this squabbling over meaning rather masks the real issue; rather than wasting breath over definitions and terms, we should instead be inspecting our own activities. Whatever name you want to give it, the current lifestyle the developed world has adopted - voracious energy consumption (as characterised by ever-increading car ownership and the use of aviation), coupled with a culture of short-term thinking, extraordinarily high expectations of convenience, and the conspicious consumption and individualised accumulation of material goods Add to that the fact that those countries which are not quite at our level of economic development (e.g. China, India) are doing their darnedest to reach the same level as us, and you’re looking at an inevitable rise in demand for natural resources. This raise an interesting question: did this lifestyle come about as a natural consequence of western capitalism, or alternatively did we create the system to fulfil our desire to live our lives in this way?

However, I don’t want to get into that (though the rest of you can feel free to do so), as the more important question is: what’s going to happen when the (cheap) oil runs out? Or, if you don’t like the peak oil idea, then how about water or fertile land? What answers can capitalism provide? Tim Worstall doesn’t really expound in great detail, but simply relies on a promise that technology will save us. A comforting notion, but one that puts too much faith in that the progress we have so far enjoyed will continue.

“Progress” is nearly always defined by those who benefit from it; most history is written from the “winner’s” perspective and the history of technology is no exception. All too often we get a neat, linear account of technological progression, which denies the voice of those who may have lost out, and leads us to the assumption that progress is inevitable and human choice is subservient to technology in determing the direction of society; a view not just shared by the invisible-handers but also by the likes of Karl Marx. The consequence of thisis a way of thinking that “technological progress solved problem x in the past, and we’rve benefited from that, so it will most likely solve problem y that we’re now experiencing.” All too often there are few accounts from the people who have not benefited, or even suffered, from technological change.

There is no question that new technologies will develop; there is the matter of which technologies will we have to adopt (and which we will discard), but the really big question is whether technological advances will save all of us on this planet from the pain and misery of energy, water or food shortages, or rising sea levels for that matter. And the answer to that lies not simply in whether these technologies will work, but the social and economic system that will use and apply them. While capitalism has proved fiendishly good at giving us wealth, iPods and Crazy Frog ringtones, these benefits are still disproportionately held by the lucky few; it would be a truly dreadful future if the benefits of technological progress were similarly distributed. It’s for this reason (amongst others) that many of us do not believe that contemporary capitalism holds the solution to our problems.

The Home Office has published (on a website called identitytheft.org.uk, rather than identitytheft.gov.uk, curiously), a set of figures which claim that Identity Theft costs the country £1.7bn a year, a figure which is then happily used to imply ID cards would save this amount. But after a read of the report produced, the only fitting response can be a resounding “Bollocks!”

The “detailed breakdown” [PDF] is nothing of the sort; it’s merely a 4-page table of figures with the most cursory explanations for each component. The largest amount, £504.8m, is attributed to APACS-related fraud - i.e. people using debit and credit cards that don’t belong to them. The vast majority of crime committed thus is because the numbers are obtained by theft, skimming, or using discarded receipts and records; transactions are then done online or in a shop - i.e. in places where the debit/credit card is the primary means of identification, and a government-issued identity card would not normally be used. Having been a victim of this kind of fraud myself, I know full well that possession of an ID card would have made no difference to whether I’d been robbed or not. Only £36.9m of this sum can be down to fraudulent application or account takeover - circumstances where another means of identification is involved.

Next up is money laundering, which takes up £395m, but would this all be prevented by identity cards? Money laundering is a complex international activity, that is perpetrated through obfuscation, mixing legitimate with illegitimate money, with bank accounts and front companies all over the world. Cracking money laundering is going to take more than demanding everyone in the UK carrying a card and getting blipped every time we leave the house - most of the transactions involved will be well away from the government’s biometric readers and all-knowing register. Even the report itself admits: “No figures are available currently on the proportion of money laundering that relies on identity fraud”.

Also cited is a £372m loss by the telecommunications industry. This is a substantial figure, but there are absolutely no details on how this is broken down - does this include fraudulent payment of bills with other people’s credit and debit cards (in which case it is already included above and should not be double-counted). What percentage of it is mobile phone cloning and the like - another fraud that ID cards cannot combat. Does the definition of “identity fraud” extend to bog-standard nicking someone’s phone and using it? No details are forthcoming.

Another £215m is claimed for MTIC fraud (i.e. fiddling your VAT returns), but the demands in combatting this crime are more matters of auditing and detection; ID cards may help with background checks during VAT registration, but as in terrorism, you will always be able to find people with completely “clean” backgrounds who will slip through the net. Indeed, a 2003 government speech outlining anti-MTIC policy makes no mention of ID cards as a tactic to combat it, preferring instead a diverse set of approaches, including stepping up policing and intelligence and making better analysis of existing data.

The majority of the £1.487bn that these parts total will not be saved by identity cards; certainly not identity cards alone. Out of the remaining costs, most of which are borne by the state, there are some risible claims - the UK Passport Service spends £68m checking up on fraudulent applications, but this would not be saved with an alternative system; UKPS will have to spend the same money anyway to check up on fraudulent ID card applications (if not more - as an ID card would be a one-stop-identity shop, a successfully-obtained false ID would be worth a lot more and there could be more criminals trying to obtain one). In fact, the costs to the state of fraudulent identity, where compulsory provision of a card would definitely save money - unpaid fines, police time taken in checking suspects’ identities, social security fraud etc. runs to a hundred million, maybe two, at best. And plenty of that might be saved if the government tightened its own security procedures, as proven in the tax credit fraud fiasco.

In short then, the Home Office is desperate to prove that we will save the unknown number of billions an ID card system will cost us, so much so that they try to include every dubious reason they can think of with little explanation. The fact that this piss-poor, four page executive summary of an executive summary is what passes for a “detailed breakdown” suggests they’re being as obscure about the benefits as they are about the costs (which are always conveniently cloaked by the catch-all of commercial confidentiality). If this is the best they can do to demonstrate the worth of an identity card scheme, then it’s no wonder some of us are so sceptical about it.

Update: I didn’t know this when I wrote the post, but the NAO has condemned the Home Office’s accounts as slipshod and flawed (via Stumbling and Mumbling); perhaps they’re just incompetent then, rather than desperate.

More blogospheric goodness on the report - Curious Hamster with a bit of a Fisking, Devil’s Kitchen goes for the sweary approach.