A Sex Consent App

 An official in Australia recently made a tentative proposal that an app be developed so that both parties can positively confirm consent before sex is initiated.

 

The poor man was pilloried for this suggestion. I guess it didn’t help that he was a middle-aged man, and his job related to law enforcement. How could such a fellow claim to understand the nuances of modern life? How could anybody try to reduce our most romantic engagements to a scientific button pushing exercise? Actually, I think the poor fellow is on to something.

 

While I am at it, I would love for a second, related app to be developed. This one would require positive consent for the possibility of a pregnancy arising.

 

Imagine the benefits of these two little apps. Women (and men) would be protected from the “he said, she said” ambiguity that comes up in legal cases, and more often stops legal cases or even formal disputes from arising. There would be full equality between the partners in terms of responsibility and accountability, for both sex and pregnancy. Unwanted pregnancies, that have blighted countless female lives since time immemorial, would become a thing of the past.

 

These potential benefits are so large that surely it is worth trying to address the legitimate issues that would make it difficult to implement these apps. Rather than quoting an issue and immediately dismissing the ideas, we would embrace the dream of the ideas and work back to try to address the issues.

 

The issues arise in at least four categories. There are technical concerns, privacy issues, ethical or moral or spiritual matters, and concerns about loss of romantic spontaneity and the joy of “the game”. Let us address them each in turn.

 

Technical issues are critical, but given the rate of medical and IT progress in the last few years they are probably surmountable quite quickly. For the pregnancy consent, the challenge is a medical one. Reliable contraception would need to be the default for both women and men. Both parties would need to actively “turn it off” for pregnancy to become possible, each having to signal agreement for both themselves and their partner. The contraceptive device could be physical or pharmaceutical, whichever can be proved to be 100% reliable. I sense the medical community could quickly come up with this if it had the will. For established couples, they could choose to change their default (only with each other) to “on”, perhaps needing to be positively reconfirmed monthly.

 

For the sex consent app, the technical issue is more about definition. What is sex? Does it have to involve penetration? Andrew Cuomo is about to lose is job (quite rightly) for far more modest transgressions. But an app is unlikely to work for leering or innuendo or even touching. So the issue of abuse and consent would not entirely go away with an app. It would also not eliminate rape: it would only make it indisputable that it had occurred. This issue would require more thought. Perhaps there can be a series of levels of activity, each requiring additional consent with the app. No doubt that could be other rules for same sex couples, and for young people or couples with a large age difference. This could become very complicated very quickly.

 

Next there are privacy concerns. The entire sexual history of all of us would be sitting on the Internet. These are obviously dangerous data, open to significant abuse in the wrong hands. Even if the company operating the app platform made promises about deletion or encryption or protection, it would take a while for us to build trust. Hopefully this challenge is surmountable technically.

 

The third group of concerns are about ethics and morals. Religious lobbies would doubtless reject the ideas out of hand, especially my one about pregnancy. The element of chance is considered by many to be an application of the will of God and something that we humans have no right to tamper with.

 

Of course the same arguments have been used against abortion, contraception and sex before marriage. Indeed, such people don’t seem to approve very much of sex at all (especially not for women, interestingly). Just like with contraception, it will be argued that the pregnancy app is a license for loose morals, allowing sex without its potential consequence. Then men in many cultures believe they have a right to demand sex whenever they feel like it.

 

There will be no winning over these constituencies. I can make as many liberal counter arguments as I like, about the grinding poverty caused by unwanted pregnancies, failed marriages or overpopulation, or about the sickness misery caused to victims of sexual abuse, about pervasive sexual inequality, or even the abuse of power by some women who may threaten a partner or even become pregnant deliberately without consent.

 

Society would need to be ready to accept the apps, and the politics would be fraught in many countries. Debate should be welcomed, for these are fundamental changes and no doubt there would be unintended consequences. But it is surely a good thing that the debates starts as quickly as possible and from a basis of knowledge and real possibilities rather than loose speculation.

 

The fourth concern is about the positive aspects of sexual ambiguity. Romance, chivalry, spontaneity and uncertainty provide a lot of joy for many people (and a lot of misery for others). It does seem rather heartless to potentially turn all of this off, reducing such joys to the pressing of buttons. My belief is that we would find new normals that continued to offer the same joy, but took away many of the negative consequences. It would be hard to predict how this would evolve, and perhaps some positive aspects of romance might be lost, even permanently.

 

So be it. The same sorts of arguments were used against bans of smoking or imposition of seatbelts or curtailing other reckless behaviours. Sometimes the benefit to society is so great that new rules or norms simply make sense.

 

Which brings me back to the potential benefits of these innovations. I would guess that a large majority of women have suffered an unwanted pregnancy or at least weeks of horrific fear contemplating its possibility. Many live with crushing guilt or some societal ostracism due to their sexual history. Our most important tasks on earth, to find the joy of love and to procreate, are too often sources of random outcomes and of misery.

 

In fifty years time, people will look back on our current society and shake their heads in disbelief about how we handle love, sex and pregnancy. A mature society should find a better way. Let us start solving the technical challenges now, in a way that guards our privacy. Then we can start hacking away at the moral objections and challenge the romantic ones.      

Please can we sing again

 My optimism about the next phase of the pandemic feels more justified with each passing week. The vaccine programmes are ramping up and getting shots into people’s arms, including my own. Europe seems a long way behind the US and the UK, but it is roughly where those countries were just one month ago, so I predict that the wait will not be too long for most people. As for developing countries, I also think that the current pessimism is misplaced. Once the west and China get up to 60%, they will start to donate huge quantities, and many countries can hope for something like herd immunity by the end of 2021.

 

What happens next? One challenge for all countries is how to get the rate of vaccinated adults up from 60% to 80%, once the vaccine becomes available to all who want it. Depending on the level of fear and distrust and laziness, many might choose to delay or avoid their shot. For this phase I love the Israeli initiative to give all vaccinated people a green symbol on a national app. Restaurants, clubs, businesses and synagogues then have a choice whether to opt in or opt out. If they opt in, then they can only admit vaccinated people, but then those people can behave without restriction. If they opt out they can continue to admit the non-vaccinated, but the overall business then remains subject to restrictions on capacity, mask wearing and so on. I find this brilliant, and I believe the main effect will be to quickly persuade many of the reluctant to get vaccinated, once they see their lives becoming sadder than their peers. I hope other countries adopt this sort of scheme, and not just for travel.

 

In the US, I can already sense the coming surge of people no longer following the stricter guidelines, supported by businesses anxious to rebuild their followings. I feel it myself. On Friday I will visit a museum on the subway, and I would have few qualms with other such ventures, and this feeling will become stronger with every passing month. I don’t think this sort of behaviour is reckless so long as it is within limits – I will still wear a mask in many situations and avoid crowds, and will continue with the added hand washing and so on. But we won’t want to hear any longer of more stringent restrictions. The CDC obviously sense this coming, and today announced that gatherings containing only vaccinated people are now permitted in houses and without masks.

 

So soon I will be looking for some updated realistic guidance about choral singing. Those of us who sing in groups have been almost silenced throughout the pandemic, because the science suggests that the droplets we emit through energetic singing are especially dangerous. That science is supported by a tragic incident at the start of the pandemic, where disease and even death ripped through a choir who organised one rehearsal too many. It is chastening to realise that I believe that I attended a rehearsal for a different choir on exactly the same day.

 

Now there is a need for some sensible risk management. I accept that we cannot go back to singing as we did, even if a group is fully vaccinated. But the current guidance, which is to hardly sing at all except outdoors or in tiny, tiny groups, already feels too restrictive. It is a year to the day from the last time I was able to sing with my wonderful church choir, and we are all becoming less patient now. Next month, by which time most or maybe all of us will have been vaccinated, that impatience will grow, and with it the temptation to invent our own solution.

 

So I am hoping that the various associations are busy creating new guidelines. Conceding that I am a total amateur, I can suggest a few.

 

Firstly, ventilation seems to be critical. I have one choir that rehearses in a tiny space below ground level and with tiny windows. I don’t think we can sing there any more. Venues will have to be spacious and airy and equipped with devices to increase ventilation.

 

We probably should have implemented this years ago. I have probably been merrily passing on flu viruses in choir rehearsals forever. This extra awareness is one of the beneficial side effects of the pandemic.

 

Other steps depend on whether everybody in a group is vaccinated. Even if they are, I suggest that we stand at least three feet apart horizontally (so I cannot stretch out my arm and touch the torso of my neighbour), six feet apart vertically (so that I can’t emit particles to anybody directly in front of me) and fifteen feet away for people facing me (such as an audience, congregation or conductor). If we are seated, this can be easily arranged via spacing seats and have neighbouring rows offset, like they do in theatres. Perhaps a conductor would have to wear a face shield if he or she needed to be closer to the group. If not everybody is vaccinated, the distances will have to be larger, or perhaps unvaccinated singers will need to be placed in positions at the end of rows and further apart.

 

Then there are sensible other measures to reduce risk, but ideas that might take longer to get used to. We could restrict forte singing to specific short bursts. We could wear masks when not at our seats, like people do at restaurants now. We could institute regular five-minute breaks for the ventilation to do its job, and sanitation protocols too. We should also be careful about communal water or food – again, something we probably always should have been.

 

A tougher alternative would be to sing with a mask on, except for a few minutes each rehearsal or in performances (where spacing might have to be even wider, and the gap to the nearest audience member might need to be larger still). But, having sung with a mask on for the last few months, I don’t like the idea. It took me a while to get used to breath control while masked, until I realised that most of the problem lay in my brain. More seriously, diction is a disaster in masks, and diction is too important in any choir to sacrifice easily.

 

Another restriction is about singing when sick or sickening with anything viral. Again, we should not have been doing this in the past, but now it has become obvious. We don’t want to let down the group or to miss a concert experience, but the risk is too high. Some of my smaller groups will find it difficult to adapt to this one. At church, with only one or two to a part, we may need to institute a system of understudies and last minute backups. Sometimes the director might have to postpone a planned song and replace it with something simpler and not dependent on a missing singer. We will have to get used to it, but it is a price worth paying.

 

I hope I am not being reckless with these ideas. While vaccinations are not available to all they are probably premature, but in just one more month we will be a lot further forward with immunisation. It is surely better to be prepared with something that is relatively safe and also practical, rather than have groups making up their own rules in the rush to start singing again.

 

Today I received my first invitation to sing in a project for twelve months. The project is planned for August and I probably cannot make it, but simply receiving the e-mail made it feel like spring. Relief is on the way. Let us embrace it with due caution but also with realism about risks. 

The Minimum Wage

 In the USA, Joe Biden and the Democrats were trying to sneak in a huge increase of the federal minimum wage to from $7.25 per hour to $15. They were thwarted in the effort by an obscure senate procedure when an official deemed that the measure did not fit into a bill primarily about budgets. Now they will struggle to enact any increase, because they will need ten Republican votes. They only secured seven Republican votes to convict the ringleader of an attempted coup, so it is hard to see them gaining ten votes for very much at all.

 

The minimum wage is one of those policies that has gained credence over the last twenty years or so. Back in the days before the Great Wrong Turning around 1980, the effective floor in wages was set by generally low levels of unemployment and by active trade unions. Reagan and Thatcher destroyed the unions except in a few sectors, and the idea of unemployment has become more complex with the workforce being less defined than before, now including many more women, seniors, part-timers and gig workers.

 

Wage exploitation has always been present. When I was a regional manager for Shell’s petrol station business, we had a model used to make sure our station operators made a living but not an unreasonably good one, and that included a national recommendation for the hourly pay of cashiers. The more marginal stations would come to us for subsidies and we would often happily pay out, since we did not want them to cut costs or services too deeply and we wanted to keep our stations operating.

 

My region included many deprived areas including the valleys of South Wales, and we had several stations collected subsidies. One day I was visiting a station and happened to get into conversation with the cashier, who revealed that she was being paid about a third of our recommended wage. The station operator didn’t receive any subsidy after that, even though I had to stand up to some flak from his highly placed freemason friends.

 

When such practice became more widespread in the 1990’s, the left started advocating for national minimum wages. In the UK, it was one of Tony Blair’s signature initiatives. The right fought them tooth and nail, supported by analysis published in, inter alia, The Economist.

 

My favourite periodical argued, with some merit, that a minimum wage was a market distortion that would create the wrong incentives and ultimately cost jobs. If the differential between the lowest and the median wage in firms became too low, the incentive to work hard and be promoted would be reduced. Marginal firms would be unable to survive with higher wage bills. Firms would turn to automation, or offshoring, accelerating unemployment further. Disaster was predicted.

 

The arguments seem reasonable, but the facts generally proved otherwise. Unemployment did not spike. Automation and offshoring did happen, but the trend did not accelerate and is arguably better for innovation and for consumers anyway. Firms did go under, but new ones took their place. Differentials did not narrow because firms moved their whole wage structures to retain incentives. We should remember that this was the time when managers were awarding themselves 30% rises and stock options galore, so the incentive argument was always rather tenuous.

 

I have always felt the minimum wage argument to be more about human decency than economics. In the nineteenth century people worked for nothing, and we even had slavery. We still have human trafficking and exploitation, but surely our goal should be to reduce this, even if it distorts markets somewhat. Slave owners argued that plantations would become unprofitable without slaves, after all. There is surely a decent minimum that a human should receive for an hour’s honest labour. Unscrupulous employers will always try to squeeze wages if they can. Minimum wages are good things. If firms cannot survive while paying a decent human wage, society should not want those firms anyway: if consumers really do want or need such firms, they will pay more for their goods, as market economics dictates. If a consequence is higher unemployment, it is up to the welfare state to step in.

 

The right often argues in favour of tax credits instead of minimum wages. Under this system, a firm can pay below the minimum wage, and the difference is made up by the state via a sort of negative income tax. This has merit in some circumstances, but the right should listen to their own arguments. Tax credits are much more complex, much more open to fraud or exploitation or missing their intended beneficiaries, they have incentive issues and are a greater market distortion than minimum wages. Forget about it.

 

To their credit, The Economist has shown a recent trend of ditching some of its ideological positions and showing greater humanity, always guided by data. The minimum wage is one example of a policy they now generally support. Others include place-based support for the unemployed and some interventionist housing policies. In my opinion, it is an even better magazine as a result.

 

Now, what about Biden and the USA? I have a few suggestions for an optimal policy. Whether it stands any hope of becoming law is another thing entirely.

 

Firstly, I sympathise with an argument made by Republicans and some Democrats that the minimum wage should vary across the country. A fair wage for a fair hour’s work is universal, but it is easier to live decently on $10 per hour in Kansas than it is in San Francisco. I would propose a lower absolute national minimum wage, but with a mandated supplement based on a rental cost indicator by locality. This might even create a $20 minimum wage in San Francisco.

 

Second, why is the minimum wage not index linked so it rises automatically with inflation or median wages? Social security and some other benefits are index linked. Avoiding index linking is a clever trick by the right. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 for a long, long time, during which it has progressively become less of a fair recompense for an hour’s labour, even in Kansas.

 

Lastly, let us not forget the egregious exceptions, most notably the minimum wage for tipped employees, which languishes at $2.13 per hour. Isn’t that a national disgrace? It is surely time to eliminate tips as an excuse for employers to treat their staff like chattel. Uber is trying and before the pandemic a few restaurants also joined a campaign to remove tips from the economy, or at least reduce them to a small, genuinely discretionary payment for exceptional service.

 

Highlighting the tipped minimum wage foreshadows the argument we will hear from employers. The pandemic has the restaurant industry on its knees. Demanding a potential tripling of staff wages will destroy it. There will no doubt be an onion handy to induce some tears as this argument is made.

 

Perhaps I would support a transition period of a couple of years for the tipped minimum to be abolished. But I would rather see fewer, well-run, quality restaurants offering fair wages to staff and not bullying customers with 15% tip standards than the inhuman mess we had before the pandemic. A tip should be discretionary. A wage should allow somebody to live with decency and not be exploited by their boss. This is simple humanity.