VoN #4: Can you really live without money?

Shut your mouth, Betteridge. Also: the campaign to stop water from ruining our countryside, how a leading AI accidentally emulated a broken bureaucracy, and the colossal costs of complex care cases.

The British middle classes have deeply weird relationship with the concept of money, and honestly I could write about 250,000 words on the topic¹. It combines a kind of secretive omertà, in which almost nobody is willing to talk about what they earn or how they earn it, with an overriding sense that earning money is a gauche, borderline immoral activity, the preserve of rich fat cats or the grasping working class.

It doesn’t help that virtually every case study on household finances ever presented in the media is a pile of absolute steaming nonsense, from 26-year-olds who used ‘one simple trick’ to pay off their mortgage (getting mummy and daddy to pay for it), to WASPIs pretending not to know their retirement age.

Vegetable patches - much better in pictures than in reality.

But the absolute pinnacle of the form is the saintly figure who lives without money. This was pioneered by Mark Boyle a few years back, a forest-bothering Luddite who built houses out of wattle and daub and spent his days telling Guardian readers that ambulances and medicines are bad, actually. His example inspired The Guardian’s latest champion, ‘the woman who lives without money’. Here’s a taste of her lifestyle:

At first, food was her biggest concern and the easiest need to satisfy. “I didn’t actually do much dumpster diving, I didn’t need to,” she says, because she was growing food herself and friends would give her waste food. “People often have things they’re never going to use in the back of their cupboards.”

And whenever her birthday or Christmas rolled around, she would ask her parents for, say, a 5kg bag of rice or a packet of powdered milk.

She soon started tapping into the “gift economy” more deeply, giving without expecting anything in return, receiving without any sense of obligation.

The problem with this is pretty obvious: the ‘gift economy’ only exists because we have a rich, real economy that delivers spectacular abundance beyond the wildest dreams of anyone living at any previous point in history. That abundance inevitably leads to surplus and that’s why someone can casually gift you a 5kg bag of rice in the first place - I suspect they’d be less inclined to do so if they had to go harvest those grains in the fields. The same is true of, say, dumpster diving. Claiming you’ve created a new model of cash-free living from these activities is a bit like saying you’ve ended the need for property by living in someone’s porch.

But, fair play. It’s easy to snark, but it takes a kind of bravery to go out on a limb and live a complete alternative lifestyle, even if that lifestyle would be wildly unsustainable if we all tried it. I couldn’t do it, so I’ve got a certain level of respect for people who can. No, the part I have a problem with is this arrangement:

Instead of paying rent, Nemeth cooks, cleans, manages the veggie garden and makes items such as soap, washing powder and fermented foods to save the household money and reduce its environmental footprint.

This is framed as wholesome community living, but scratch the surface and it’s deeply regressive. Call me old-fashioned, but people employed to do labour should get paid with actual money. Instead, we end up with a woman doing unpaid domestic labour for a richer household in exchange for her basic needs. A woman with no ability to save or be financially independent.

There’s a reason why progressives think it’s abhorrent for welfare payments to be given out in the form of food vouchers - it deprives people of basic human agency, the ability to make choices that earning real, fungible money provides you. Your housing, food and WiFi access shouldn’t be conditional on your job. Nor should the price you pay for goods be dependent on goodwill from your neighbours - god help the brave truth-sayer who goes against the village in that scenario.

NIMBYs take on water

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” But Hamlet never met the modern British NIMBY movement, who have not only dreamed of all possible things in Heaven and Earth, but filed letters of complaint about most of them. Their latest target is actual water, or dihydrogen oxide. You might know it as a clear and inoffensive liquid that sustains life of all kinds, but to a NIMBY it’s literally poison, forming toxic pools across the landscape in which all life will perish.

Water, an environmental disaster. Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

Their latest target is Abingdon reservoir, a proposed 150 billion litre lake that will supply drought-prone London and the Thames valley with much needed water in the second half of the century. The local reaction to it is unhinged², with the BBC reporting that: “Councillors have expressed their ‘disgust’ and fears of the "’decimation’ of Oxfordshire as plans for a large new reservoir gather pace.”

To put this in context, the last reservoir completed in Britain was Carsington Water in 1992 - 33 years ago. It caused so much environmental damage that it’s now… an RSPB wildlife reserve, with some 200 bird species recorded³. Since then the UK population has increased by 10 million people with no additional reservoirs built, which is a big issue if you care about boring first world problems like ‘being able to have running water’

Thankfully the reservoir is set to go ahead after a recent name-check by Rachel Reeves, but as Jim Waterson points out: “Someone who was sitting their A-levels when this reservoir was first proposed will be able to draw their pension before its (probably optimistic) planned opening date.”

How an AI learned to emulate the worst kind of bureaucracy

A recurring theme of this blog is that organisations of all kinds are diametrically opposed to things like ‘people having a great quality of life’ due to fundamental misalignments of values. The alignment problem is a well-worn topic in AI, where philosophers threat about the damage that could be caused by intelligences who fail to share our goals and ethics, but what few people consider is that large organisations are artificial intelligences in their own right, vast supra-human entities, machines built from intricate processes and algorithms and incentive structures, delivering outcomes that are rarely the consequence of one individual’s thoughts and actions.

So it’s fascinating to see a study that attempted to use generative AI to guide government policy, only to find that it behaved like the worst kind of institutional blocker. The infected blood compensation scheme was set up to compensate people who were given infected blood in the 80s, and absolutely nobody thinks it’s a bad idea⁴. Researchers tested an AI to see if it would adopt similar recommendations, given sufficient information and context:

“It concluded that “The Infected Blood Compensation Scheme Regulations should NOT be adopted,’ recommending instead ‘to return the regulations for immediate revision with timeline requirements, adjudication criteria, impact assessment, budget allocation, administrative capacity assessment, monitoring implementation progress.” Needless to say, its recommendation in this test was outside the realm of sensible political decision-making.

The model, despite its sophisticated language capabilities and logical reasoning, approached this deeply human and political issue through the lens of procedural criteria – focusing on timeline requirements, administrative capacity, and budget allocation. While these are important considerations, they reflect how AI systems trained on standard benchmarks may miss the moral and social dimensions and political reasoning that drive such decisions.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it reads like basically every dysfunctional committee that calls for endless reviews, assessments and mitigations in lieu of getting on with things - this is literally how we get bat tunnels. The lesson here extends far beyond AI: if you build dogmatic technocratic systems that apply rigid rules but lack a basic foundation in values and common sense, the odds are that they’ll deliver terrible outcomes, if they deliver anything at all.

The extraordinary cost of ‘complex cases’

In my recent piece, The End of the Playground, I touched on the terrifying financial tsunami that looks set to destroy much of local government in the coming years. It’s a subject I plan to come back to in the future, but a key issue is the rising cost of ‘complex cases’.

In Central Bedfordshire, the average cost of residential care for children rose from £2,000 to £4,000 per week in 12 months and is projected to hit £6,300 in the next 12 months, which is insanely expensive, “but this is just an average. The cost can vary depending on the needs of the child. Our highest-cost residential care placement is currently £15,000 a week because the individual requires two people with them and specialist individual accommodation.”

That £15,000 per week equals over £750k per year for one child, but even the average is north of £300k per annum. To put that in context, the council’s entire leisure and libraries budget is £4.4 million. This is money local councils simply don’t have.

What do these complex cases look like? The BBC have been following the case of ‘Jessie’, a woman being taken to court by the NHS after spending over 550 days in Northampton General Hospital. She was medically fit to be discharged in April 2023, but has remained in her hospital bed ever since due to having nowhere suitable to go. The nursing home she had been living in previously refused to take her back because “it could no longer meet her needs.”

After about a year she was offered “a supported living flat in a nearby town, with two care staff initially present 24 hours a day,” but she refused, citing ‘bad memories’ associated with the town. At this point, nobody seems to have known what to do, as you can tell from the following mini-tour of public bodies:

North Northamptonshire Council, which is responsible for her housing and care, says it cannot comment because of an ongoing police investigation into Jessie's behaviour.

The hospital says it "is not the best environment for patients who are not in need of acute medical care".

The Department of Health and Social Care has told the BBC: "This is a troubling case which shows how our broken NHS discharge system is failing vulnerable people."

The BBC estimate the cost of the hospital bed at around £200k, but that’s nothing compared to the costs the council will end up bearing, likely several hundred thousand pounds per year. As we just saw, a few of these cases and… bam, that’s your local library budget gone or your public spaces defunded or bin collections reduced. And ‘Jessie’ is just 35 years old - multiply that money by twenty or thirty years or more, and the council will have spent many millions of pounds on one person⁵ without apparently helping them that much.

No part of this seems sustainable or helpful, and the worst part is that nobody really seems to have ownership of this, let alone a plan. It’s hard to see how any evaluation of social care policy can succeed unless it figures out how to address complex cases that are consuming local capacity, even as we fail to fix anything for the people involved.

Energy Freedom!

Let’s finish on some good news, as the Baltic states disconnect from Russian power lines:

“Today, history is made. We connect the Baltic states to our continental European electricity grid. Electricity lines with Russia and Belarus are being dismantled. These chains of power lines linking you to hostile neighbours will be a thing of the past. This is freedom: freedom from threats; freedom from blackmail. Long before the Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, you were warning us that the cheap gas bought from Russia has a hidden cost, the cost of dependence. Now Europe as a whole is phasing out Russian fossil fuels.”

Stirring stuff, now get nuclear power moving and defence spending up to sensible levels…

That’s all for this week, a new ‘proper’ essay is coming next Tuesday, and in the meantime you can follow me on BlueSky.

1. That is a threat and you should be afraid.

2. A lot of criticism of new reservoirs suggests that water companies should just ‘fix leaks’. This is both impossible and undesirable - there is an optimal amount for a water network to leak. Fixing every single leak in a century-old network would take hundreds of billions of pounds and put cones on every road in the country. Trade-offs have to be made between reducing leaks to a sensible level and adding new capacity.

3. This is not unusual - reservoirs are generally fantastic habitats and e.g. the Lake District is full of them. It turns out that lakes and wetlands are actually pretty good for wildlife - who knew!

4. Well, somebody does, and they’ll probably turn up the comments so I don’t know why I said that.

5. It’s striking how high this figure is compared to, e.g. the recommend value of one quality-adjusted life year (QALY) at £35k. Any long-term plan that links social care and the NHS is going to have to come to some kind of equivalence on acceptable value for money, or risk shunting people from one service to another based on cost.