Busted
We've had a bust, but did we ever have a boom? The Treasury says we did not.
You might think that was a little, er, counter-intuitive. Can you really have a bust this big, without having a previous boom? Yet a good chunk of the economic analysis in its 2009 Budget book is devoted to proving exactly that.
In case you were wondering, it matters whether the Treasury economists are right on this one. If they are, Britain was hit by financial lightning toward the end of 2007, and now all we need to do is clean up the damage and carry on much as before.
But if they are wrong, and the government in fact failed to spot a massive boom in the years before this bust, there could be some important lessons for future governments - and for how fast they can safely allow the British economy to grow.
Before the Budget I said that the Treasury had decided to write off 4% of GDP as the permanent cost of the credit crunch, but they might just as well have said there had been a temporary windfall of 4% in the boom years, which had now gone away.
Now the Treasury has raised that permanent cost to 5% of GDP. And Robert Chote, the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has turned that basic idea into two very nifty charts.
They take some explanation, but I think it's worth it.
The first chart shows how the Treasury's view of our recent economic history has changed since Budget 2008. The line in the middle represents the "trend" growth in Britain's potential output - think of it as what economic growth would be, if the government really did put an end to booms and busts, and the economy grew simply in line with potential. Roughly speaking, if the economy is well above that line it's operating above capacity - something you associate with a boom. If it's well below, then that is a recession, and there's a lot of productive capacity going unused.
As you can see, the Treasury version shows the UK trundling along close to the "safe" rate of growth from 2002 onwards, then plunging by 5% when the credit crunch struck (that's the "permanent loss in trend output"). Then it has a recession, which is forecast to bring another 5% loss in output, relative to potential, by early 2010.
The result is what you might call the "immaculate recession". The economy ends up 10% smaller at the end of 2009 than it would have been if it had simply grown at its trend rate. But this happens without any preceding period of operating above capacity.
Of course, as Chote suggests, there is that alternative view of history: "that the productive potential of the economy did not go into sudden and unpredictable decline in mid-2007, but rather that the government - among many others - consistently overestimated the potential of the economy in the good years, lulled into a false sense of security by global disinflation."
This is shown in the second chart, which simply assumes that Britain's potential growth rate grew by 2.6% a year since 1997, or roughly its long-term trend. That's in contrast to the Treasury's more complicated story, which has it growing by 3.5% a year in Labour's first term, then by 2.75% a year until the crisis hit, then by only 1% a year for 3 years, before going back to 2.75%.
Miraculously, the economy at the end of 2009 ends up exactly the same place as the Treasury now predicts, with the economy running 5% below its potential. The only difference is that the period from 2000 onwards shows up as a massive boom, with output running 3-4% above potential.
On this view, in the lead-up to this crisis the government did what nearly every post-war British government has done, and simply mistook a boom for a long-term increase in Britain's potential growth.
It's a neat talking point for the government's critics. But does it matter? Well, yes and no. If the second version of history is true, it suggests that Britain's fiscal policy should have been much tighter than it was from 2000 onwards, even according to the government's own fiscal rules.
But that is 20/20 hindsight. If (then) Chancellor Brown had known that we were heading for this kind of bust, he would presumably have wanted to do something to stop things getting out of hand. The interesting question is what.
After all, inflation wasn't showing any sign of an unsustainable boom, and that was all the Bank of England was supposed to be worried about. Tightening fiscal policy might have eased demand a little, but it's hard to believe it would have been politically possible to tighten by 4% of GDP. Even the IFS was only talking of a "hole" in the budget of about 1% of GDP.
You could say it all underlines the case for "macro-prudential" tools to support financial stability, and all the other additions to the authorities' armoury that are now being discussed. But that is not where the debate was in, say, 2003.
Back then, there was extensive debate about whether central bank should or could intervene to prevent booms in housing and other asset markets. The consensus then was that it was better to wait, and clean up after the bust. On this view, any effort to prick such a bubble before then would simply bring on the recession you were hoping to avoid. As Lord George, the former governor of the Bank of England used to say, better to have imbalanced growth than no growth at all.
Now we are supposed to know better. But, as I've discussed before, even with elaborate new tools and targets to counter excess exuberance, the authorities are going to have to be much more determined than they have ever been in the past if they are not, eventually, to make the same mistake again. There's a reason they say you can't abolish the economic cycle.
Still, if they can't bring an end to boom and bust, governments can at least build a war chest during the boom years, to help in the inevitable clean-up when it all goes wrong.
The government thought they had done that with the budget surpluses of 1998-2001. Those surpluses did help to reduce our net debt by about 10% of GDP in Labour's first term. But whether you believe the credit crunch was a natural progression or a bolt from the blue, knowing what we know now, even the Treasury must wish it had squirreled away a lot more.
I'm 
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~52~RS~)
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So the Treasury appear to support GB as he clearly did end the boom and bust cycle as there was no boom! To paraphrase E George better to have boom and bust than no boom and just bust.
In addition the absence of any effective regulation of the finance sector fiddling with base interest by some geeky MPC to manage a modern technologically complex economy is absurd and Labour will probably endure many years of opposition because it chose to exhume the Adam Smith view of economics.
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There is another possibility, which is that there is no constant "trend" growth rate, and that for many years we have overestimated the potential of our economy to continue to grow. If you do a rough plot of annual growth rates since the 1970s, they do seem to have fallen steadily across the developed world. It may be that we have already invented and installed most of the easy technology, and each innovative step from here on will be harder than the last. If true, this wouldn't mean that we are all doomed, just that we should lower our expectations about future growth! Life in the developed world is pretty comfortable anyway.
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but thats what Brown did say "we have abolsihed boom and bust"
So we have two views
1) HMG GB got it all right and its not his fault
2) HMG GB got it all wrong and its all his fault
His profligate spending plans to sovietise the UK are the real cause as he needed tax reciepts from a booming city to finance it other wise there
would be large tax and borrowing, just have we have now.
He did nothing to sort out the structura issues that the UK faced and faces today.
Trying to re-write history before its even passed seems to be whats going on
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Excellent blog that gets to the heart of the issue. Personally, I believe scenario 2 is true but if I'm a politician, I would prefer scenario 1. Irrational exuberance is all about believing 'things are different this time'. If this also fits with what you would like to believe for political purposes then you have a problem - you spend beyond your means and this catches up with you in the end. Perhaps economic policy is too important to leave to politicians? Instead governments should set a 'policy of stability' and let independants work out how to achieve this. They then tell the government how much they can spend depnding on all the economic factors, putting pressure to cut & save cash when we are 'booming' and also spend when we need to. Not an end to boom and bust I'm sure (some boom and bust may be good for 'efficiency' but unpleasant if you are at the sharp end) but perhaps may take the extremes off both ends of the cycle.
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Unfortunately, the marginal productivity of debt in Britain and the USA has been less than 1 for quite some time. But no-one seemed to notice this.
In 2006, the marginal productivity of debt actually fell below zero for the first time. In other words, borrowing GBP 1,000 led to an increase in productivity of only GBP 900. This meant the borrower only had GBP 900 of additional profits from which to repay the loan of GBP 1,000
This caused the borrower's profits to shrink. Eventually, many borrowers within the economy as a whole found they didn’t have enough money to repay their loans....
This caused lenders to suffer bad debts.
This is why we now find ourselves in a global slump. The debts of Britain and the USA outweigh the productivity of our economies. This is causing our economies to shrink.
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Anyone who worked in manufacturing through the last three decades will have experienced the very large gains in productivity that were obtained by "lean production". While there is always room for further improvement, there was a very big one-off gain here. Similar one-off gains were experienced when overmanned industries were privatised; a clear example is power stations that run with one third the number of staff required under the CEGB. It is often forgotten that five years after the miners' strike 80% as much coal was being mined with 20% of the number of miners. In service industries, telephone and later internet banking have delivered similar productivity gains. Unless and until such approaches are applied in the public sector the scope for further economic growth can be expected to fall well below the trend of the last decades.
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thescienceguy - good point about growth rates. All economies rely on growth - but will we run out of opportunities for this? I have enough 'stuff' already and only need to replace occasionally. The population is still growing but this can't go on forever - what happens then? Is there an economic model for zero growth/contraction that works? I don't think it would involve pensions/stock market investment growth and low interest rates would be then norm - too much cash around with not enough investment opportunities. What jobs would be left?? Perhaps a while off yet - I'm sure most politicians hope so!
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I go with graph 2. Albeit in hindsight Labour pulled off the biggest con trick in history. By any analysis we now have a huge government burden which we cannot afford. Devolution = jobs for the boys. No coincidence that Scotland and Wales were Labour strong holds hence need extra government to manage. Who pays?
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The Treasury continue to live in cloud cuckoo land if they believe we have not experienced a "boom" followed by a "bust".
Such a first could only happen in the world of "Browneconomics", where you dismantle regulation of the banking system from the experienced BoE and hand it to a novice and newly created Quango (FSA) with no financial experience amongst its newly "appointed" members. Then change the measurment of inflation to exclude the most expensive outlay in most housholds, housing costs. As Gordon has said in one of his "Treasury" moments of not understanding where it all went wrong, this is the first time a bust has happened when interest rates have been low. Hmm!! The penny still hasn't dropped.
If Gordon had allowed for the natural order of things we would have had a "bust" in 2001 after the "dot.com market collapse". This bust was not allowed to happen because Gordon initiated his Keynsian policy then, after 4 years of prudence he opened the flood gates on public spending and has never turned the taps off to this day. What! nobody noticed him doing this?
He didn't stop there he followed Alan Greenspan's model of internal growth through the housing market, there was to be no interference in reckless market behaviour that allowed lending to go to 6Xsalary (in some cases a mythical or grossly inflated salary figure), 125% the value of the property being bought. Once the rollercoaster ride was underway there was no desire to stop it, wars had to be paid for and elections (2005) had to be won.
No boom Eh!! wonder what the people who are losing their jobs and/or devalued houses, think of that pearl of wisdom from the "Font of Denial" previously known as the Treasury.
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As well as having lessons for economic policy, I think that which of the two stories about past growth is true also influences our expectations of how quickly we grow again.
The rosy HMT view assumes a sharp turn around to trend growth, which is a reasonable assumption if all the loss in output is due to an exceptional external shock.
If, however, we are bust after a boom, then the turn back to trend growth is likely to be slower, as there will be more deadwood to clear out of the economy. In this (much more likely) view, a return to healthy growth as quickly as the HMT forecasts say is very unlikely. Which rather messes up the borrowing figures in the next few years.
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It's clear that Brown et al wanted to prove a point even if the point was wrong. Many people (myself included) could see this coming as far back as 2004. If I and a few workmates could see it coming in the course of chatter at the coffee machine it is hard to believe that supposedly highly trained economists couldn't see it coming until it hit.
The trouble is the country is buried under so much debt that everything looks fine on the surface but there's no resilience left. Most people I know fall into one of two groups - either those in work who struggle to keep their heads above water (and who live basic lives because they can't afford any more) or those out of work who live very basic lives because it's all they can afford.
We're seeing what might be green shoots now, but just wait until the next snowfall finishes them off.
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There was no boom according to the Treasury because they ignore asset price inflation!
The money came from and vanished into insane and unsupportable increases in the price of property and until and unless this is unwound there can be no recovery!
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If you show a graph of house prices compared to salaries you will see the BOOM.
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BUSTED INDEED
"In case you were wondering, it matters whether the Treasury economists are right on this one. If they are, Britain was hit by financial lightning toward the end of 2007, and now all we need to do is clean up the damage and carry on much as before."
Come on...
What we all know is that a lot of credit was given to a lot of people where the risk was securitized and insured on the basis that the insurance would noit have to be paid out. So long as we had continuous growth, those running the game thought the CDSs etc would not have to be paid. Once that myth was exposed, loans dried up and the jobs/production based upon the irresponsible loans (especially housing, student loans, and cars) started to disappear as they were premised on bad i.e unsustainable economics.
our politicized Civil Service is not going to be abe to talk their way out of this one, as the bottom line is that the loans can't be re-issued without great risk of default to the banks/public ...as I see it.
If you (Stephanie) or anyone else, knows better, I'm perfectly happy to be corrected as I'm sure many others will be.
The root of this, as I have said many times, lies in presentations like this being radically flawed/biased/ill-informed. The data at odds with what you hear here is ignored/suppressed. Flynn is a political scientist, and he is wrong (look closely into sampling and teaching to the test - the 'Flynn Effect' does not measure changes in 'g' which is highly heritable and envoronmentally immutable in terms of positive impact.).
The continuous economic growth fantasy relied upon what was essentially a still widely poorly understood 'Lysenkoist myth' being bought by large numbers of people who should really have known better. The predatory (loan) behaviour depended on this myth not being exposed.
If your reaction to any of this is defensive/negative, perhaps you should ask yourself why that is so....looking very closely to what is really happening in the USA as reported by Mason and Esler on the Obama Newsnight Special for example. Confidence (spin) is not all.
At some point, the make-up has to come off.
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##11 I can think of another group.
Those that do not want to work they get equ to £25K in benifits for doing nothing, and they are quite happy with the life that they have.
do no aspire to much just sit about drinking cheap black market booze.
Do a bit of thieving etc and they are in paradice.
They have no incentive to go to work as they are given all that they want. if they were not given £25K in benifits things might be different.
where as other like myself work very very hard for a modist living and pay tax to support the £25k'er on the dole.
I can give you the post codes for these people but that would not be write and also get removed from the blog
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The treasury are correct.
There was no boom as such, and measures taken over the last few months have stabilized the financialsystem. In due course these steps will allow a return to normality and rising house price with the return of securitization.
The recovery has already started with surging stock markets. House prices should start rising by the second quarter next year, just in time for the next election.
Its back to business as usual. the doomsters have been proved wrong!
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When a household borrows money they are borrowing against their future income. A part of their future income goes to pay off the capital, and another part goes to pay off the interest.
When a government borrows money it is also borrowing against its future income. But a government doesn't produce anything so its only income is from taxation. Guess which way taxes are going to go to fund this profligate borrowing? Oddly enough the man who signed the loan agreement doesn't seem to see it.
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#15 - I know these people exist, I just personally don't know any of them. I know one guy who is on benefits due to a number of issues and he doesn't get anything like that. He spends a lot of time juggling his budget to fit things in and isn't the chain-smoking, Sky TV-watching stereotype of benefits claimants.
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LordGeenShoots (#16) "The recovery has already started with surging stock markets. House prices should start rising by the second quarter next year, just in time for the next election.
Its back to business as usual. the doomsters have been proved wrong!"
Drugs Counsellor:"Don't shoot-up, it'll just take over your life and you'll never be clean."
Junkie:"Listen you evangelical muppet - have you ever tried cold-turkey? - I only do this to avoid that!"
;-)
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Very good LordGreenShoots, an excellent post that highlights the insanity of the Treasury's version of events! I especially enjoyed the bit about the return of securitization. Most amusing.
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Stephanie,
In 2004 the BoE said " House proces have risen rapidly in recent years...the annual inflation rate in February 2004 was about 17%..There is little doubt that such rates of increase are unsustainable ( Olaf Weeken)". Converting inflation focus from RPI ( including housing costs) to CPI may have dislocated what was happening with housing wealth / cost from BoE targets in stability. But low inflation and stable interest rates ( whether low or not) could have perversely caused the boom. House price inflation could have caused consumption to dislocate itself from expectations of income growth. 'Stability' could have lessened the perceived need for precautionary saving by households which encouraged over consumption. Clever people in the BoE then thought the links between housing asset inflation and consumption were becoming less clear. I dont think that was right.Expectations of income growth might then have been surplanted with a view that house asset equity could provide the "get out of gaol" if things went wrong - promoting over consumption. Add sexy 'buy to let' investment schemes fuelling more credit demand and you could see where the boom was manufactured.
Add uncontrolled international securitisation and wholessale funding models to banking,shareholder growth demands,light-touch regulation, private equity buy-outs and hedge fund deals with cheap money from the east and you have a disaster. Surely, the BoE/Treasury are learning the lessons for the future. Booms aint growth!
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6. At 10:19am on 01 May 2009, Forlornehope wrote:
"It is often forgotten that five years after the miners' strike 80% as much coal was being mined with 20% of the number of miners. In service industries, telephone and later internet banking have delivered similar productivity gains. Unless and until such approaches are applied in the public sector the scope for further economic growth can be expected to fall well below the trend of the last decades"
And the other 80% of miners, plus the bank clerks and switchboard/Directory Enquiries operators then did what exactly? How silly of me, it doesn't really matter does it, as long as they weren't a drag on more economic growth. A good early example of privatising the profits and socialising the losses.
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#16 guess peers dont have to worry about how they are going to pay their debts then? At a time when most normal humans are worried about keeping their jobs, most are not going to rush back in to the housing market, ergo there will be no rises in the housing market in the forseeable future. IMHO it will be quite the opposite as people strugle to make repayments with rising unemployment and eventually rising interest rates.
There is a long way for this to play out.
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#14 JadedJean:
One has to stand in awe of your ability to import your fixation with IQ into any discussion JJ! Still, your link was most interesting, and I think illustrates perfectly the dangers involved in basing arguments on an overly simplistic interpretation of IQ test data derived from disparate populations. Think about it (as you are fond of saying yourself).
Stephanie - a most interesting blog. I take it that there is no objective method of determining which interpretation of the data is 'correct'?
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This is a nice academic argument that can be left to the economists in their university departments.
The real story is that the government failed to manage the economy properly for a variety of reasons, a proportion of senior managers in the banking industry were incompetent, and the inevitable happened. Anyone who questioned that the government was behaving properly was rhetorically beaten up and anyone in the banking industry who questioned his bosses was fired.
I don't think this is just a statistical issue but a cultural and a psychological issue. Or as Virgil once wrote `those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad'. I wonder if my cast list is the same as that of the gods?
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# 19 - think I know what you mean. But my view is obviously shared by the present UK government and US treasury, Why? All they keep talking about is 'the return of credit', getting back to the status-quo-ante, etc. In other words, they do not believe (at least in public) there was anything seriously wrong with the model of securitization, off balance sheet manipulation, house price inflation etc. Refusal to allow an updated Glass-Steagal or similar only confirms this. The gamble made is that the measures taken so far (recapitalization, QE, etc) will remedy the problem by returning things to 'normal' and this approach appears to be working for the markets!
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Good grief how many times does it have to be said. We had a housing finance fed boom but it was riding on top of a declining economy. Massive treasury income relating to housing turned up in the public purse yet the economic growth rate was flat. If the economic growth was flat under those circumstances it is obvious that the underlying economic activity had to be in decline. Now the housing boom has gone we are back on the decline curve and have a recession on top. The current downturn is largely clearing out the big businesses that have been hanging on without any growth, for without naming any names, some have been in trouble for a decade or more. This is the new landscape. It is not an accident that everytime the housing market was showing signs of slowing wheezes were introduced to keep it on the boil, extending LTV, reducing deposit criteria, easing income multiples, bringing in BTL when FTBs started to become extinct. If somebody walking down the street can see it then it is not credible to suggest that somebody paid full time to monitor the economy did not see it. Look to the Japanese experience that is the likely outcome. This is a deep structural problem and the brown froth has made the problem all the worse because it has been covering up the problem. The housing boom is basically a ponzi scheme and like all ponzi schemes once started it has to run its course because stopping it voluntarily can only cause collapse so it is kept on until the bitter end, and it will be very bitter for many. In the face of low labour zones continuing to undermine activity here there is only technical edge, smart flexible manufacture, culture and innovation. Not big business as we used to know it. The FX has to be kept low to help what big business there is left as much as possible, so thank goodness we are not in the euro, ie we are to have reduced wealth for sometime. It is not rocket science it is very very simple. I do not know how anybody can say Brown was ever any good. He is dangerous because he believes he is influential economically when clearly he is not.
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#16 - there was no boom as such? House prices doubling in four years (1999-2003), the stock market almost doubling in four years (2003-2007), ever-more inventive mortgages made available just so people could edge their way into overpriced properties they couldn't afford... nope, no boom there.
Measured over the longer term our so-called continuous growth looks less impressive. The FTSE-100 hit 6930 on 31 Dec 1999 and has never regained the same height in absolute terms let alone inflation-adjusted terms (measured using gold as a benchmark the FTSE has lost some 75% or more since 1999).
And of course the illusion of growth was perpetuated by a corresponding growth in personal, corporate and government debt. We didn't get any wealthier, we simply bought more things with borrowed money. So thanks to the liability to pay interest most people became poorer over time. So on the basis that people weren't actually getting wealthier, just feeling like they had money, you could argue there was no boom. But I think if we're going to use that argument we have to accept that what we had was even worse.
At least with boom and bust you get the chance to get rich during the boom, with what we just had most people are facing the bust without the chance to get rich first.
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probablynogod (#24) 'g' is a FACTOR. Do you understand what a FACTOR is? Are physicists fixated on forces?
One important use of FACTOR ANALYSIS is as a data reduction technique. Reduction of variables in science is important. I suggest you think about that, but suspect you won't, as you appear to think you already know what is important and what is not.
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LordGreenShoots (#26) Exactly. The fact is that people tend not to change (their behaviour) - one has to change the people - literally. Sadly, sometimes that has been done violently for this very reason. The Conservative and Liberal-Democrat parties are not viable alternatives to New Labour. As I've repeatedly said elsewhere, a reformed Old Labour might be, but whether there are enough of those people still about (anywhere) and willing to listen and learn from past errors of policy, is moot, as they've generally been vilified/depicted rather effectively as 'Nazis', 'fascists', 'statists' and have a poor understanding of behaviour and the true nature of its diversity.
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''The economy ends up 10% smaller at the end of 2009 than it would have been if it had simply grown at its trend rate''
And where is this contraction falling, in the private sector. So in terms of the private sector you can nearly double the impact, to nearly 20 percent. That is what you are seeing going on around you. Public spend having had no cut backs, in fact the employment numbers have been climbing. The whole basis of the current public spend strategy is to mitigate the downturn and jump the gap until things pick up again. But if this is a landslide to a new level there is no gap to jump, it is driving off a cliff. The public accounts are in a very dangerous state and could easily unravel. The response so far appears to be to dip into reserves and talk of extra direct charges to maintain public services. This can only be descibed as misguided. Under the expectation of substantially reduced tax totals surely it is absolutely imperative that steps are take to reduce public expenditure. The whole system needs rebooting. It is highly likely that we are reading in 12 months time that things are not as bouyant as hoped for, that economic growth is not as good as forecast. I can see no way back for Brown or NuLabour, the only prospect is less and less credibility as reality dawns on the public that we are without a paddle and without a canoe. Following the GE what is the betting that the public accounts are determined to be worse than projected. BTW if growth in Brown froth period has been 3 percent per annum and the treasury say there is a permanent 5 percent drop then the underlying economic decline has been 2 percent. Brown has been captain of a sinking ship and apparently not noticed it, that takes a bit of doing.
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26 LordGreenShoots
Yes of course - only a million jobless to go and then all will be rosy.
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30 jj
''The Conservative and Liberal-Democrat parties are not viable alternatives to New Labour.''
The Conservatives are currently 1/8 to win, so somebody thinks they are viable. Search 'general election odds'.
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glanafon
Message 27
`If somebody walking down the street can see it then it is not credible to suggest that somebody paid full time to monitor the economy did not see it.'
Excellent point. I always find the number of active tenancies on small industrial estates a useful signifier of economic performance. Many estates are empty now. I have never seen it this bad.
Message 31
`The whole basis of the current public spend strategy is to mitigate the downturn and jump the gap until things pick up again. But if this is a landslide to a new level there is no gap to jump, it is driving off a cliff.'
Another good point. This is why there are two legs to this recession (slump?). We are in a liquidity bounce at the moment as surviving businesses finally get some funding and begin to mop up any remaining customers left high and dry after competitors went broke. The real recession starts when the government realises its financial condition is quite unsustainable.
if we think it is bad now it is going to get quite horrible before it gets better. That is always assuming it does get better.
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There is a very strong relationship between energy and money.
Non financial sector growth relies on growth in energy or increased efficiency (or a mix of the 2). Financial sector growth too should be linked to energy growth as the financial sector is linked to the rest of the economy, something that seems to have been forgotten.
Recently the financial sector thought they could ignore this create more money without increasing the energy supply - i.e. moving away from the energy standard, creating money without the means to back it
So if the growth in energy slows (i.e. supply constraint including political or lack of investment in the recent past), economic growth slows.
GDP growth 1850-1973 (excluding major wars) in industrialised economies was about 1/3 higher than post the oil crisis of 1973 (and the increased cost of energy that resulted).
As the growth in energy supply post 2000 has been small (any one notice the resultant silly energy price rises over the last couple of years?) i.e. we didn't increased capacity (new oil / gas wells, nuclear plants, wind turbines...) to create growth instead it was just "created" by the financial sector and eventually we have found there is nothing real to back this growth up, the emperor new clothes (growth) were created by the financial sector without the cloth (energy) to back the growth up.
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glanafon (#33) "The Conservatives are currently 1/8 to win, so somebody thinks they are viable. Search 'general election odds'."
Have you ever given any thought to how many people believe in astrology?
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Stephanie, your 2 graphs would have meant more if the x-axes had been calibrated in a way that I could understand.
This Labour government started well enough in the 1990's, when Gordon held the purse strings.
After a few years though, The Blair started financial surf-boarding, a high risk strategy with no "fall-back" safe position.
Now Gordon has well and truly fallen off the surfboard, and we are paying the price for the last 10 years of Labour risky malpractice.
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36 jj
This was your statement - ''The Conservative and Liberal-Democrat parties are not viable alternatives to New Labour.''
This was mine - 'The Conservatives are currently 1/8 to win, so somebody thinks they are viable.'
Nothing to do with astrology. Bookmakers reflect opinion and make a profit and are doing well despite the downturn. I am not convinced, like you, that NuBlu is better than NuLab but they look somewhat likely. My main concern is I do not want to see another landslide victory with weak opposition in the House of Commons.
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34 stanilic
If we are looking at 3 million plus unemployed mainly due to the private sector and then a shake out in the public sector that suggsets even higher unemployment. Employment pick up lags an upturn by years. If the profile is bathtub with creeping growth the prospects do not look good because any uplift will be knocked back by the forthcoming public sector squeeze. 3 million looks light at present I'm afraid.
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"On this view, in the lead-up to this crisis the government did what nearly every post-war British government has done, and simply mistook a boom for a long-term increase in Britain's potential growth. "
Voila you have answered the question already.
The first chart is the reason why they made the mistake that the second chart exposes.
Cleary Brown had his nose in chart 1 with his "no more boom and bust"
Clearly reality was firmly following the path that it has always followed shown in chart 2.
This exposes Brown's incompetance as a chancellor even more starkly.
Please show these charts to him as you hand him a sword to fall on
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RE: 36 (and others) JadedJean
As an alternative approach, could you try describing what the UK would look like if what you want actually happened. I haven't read all your posts so maybe you have done this before but if not why not try it.
I don't want to pre-empt your answer so I'll choose an out of date example. A self-identified "socialist" in the 1960s would probably have responded with a description that included nuclear disarmament, nationalising most (or all) major industries, including of course, the banks. They would probably also have included the abolition of private health care and education, even if indirectly through punitive taxation or regulation and ...
Well, you get the idea. Why not describe what you would like to see, or point at a country that demonstrates it.
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Newsjock " This Labour government started well enough in the 1990's, when Gordon held the purse strings. "
You mean when he pledged to stick to Conservative spending plans.
It was a combined Brown/Blair spending binge that followed.
With regards to this blog, I agree with other posters that the figures quoted by the Treasury and the IFS charts are irellevant if they don't take into account the vast levels of debt being accumulated in recent years. What we need is a chart that shows GDP growth rates net of debt growth. This will show whether 'true' growth is being achieved.
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As long as there are homosapiens roaming this planet there will be boom and bust.
I always giggled when Gordo chanted that "end of boom and bust" line because it shows a remarkable lack of understnading of economics and human pyschology.
You get bubbles in everything from housing to gold to stock markets to art to oil to spices to corn. Anything that does not have an infinite abundance is bound to be the subject of price speculation and fluctuation.
Even without speculators it will happen.
It's been like that since the beginning of time - the only difference now is that technology helps pick up trends faster and the advent of a large middle class with cash to spare and a herd mentality, coupled with a plethora of self-help finance books and the Kirsty and Phils of the world have made that the rises and crashes are that much sharper.
There is no ready solution to this adn the sooner this is realised the easier this recession will be to swallow.
On the subject of businesses failing at the moment - there is unfortunately an unpalatable truth for which I will no doubt be crucified on this board for airing.
The simple truth is a lot of businesses that are now failing would never have been in business in the first place had they not been carried along by the consumer boom of the last ten years.
Yes some have been trajic victims, that much is very sure.
But similarly some should've been out of business ages ago and were only treading water thanks to a limitless supply of cheap credit.
Another reason, surprisingly, why I think mre banks and finacnial institutions should've been left to go to the wall.
The new market place is simply too small for the amount of institutions competing, yet again, for a smaller pool of profit.
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glanafon (#38) You didn't understand what I posted.
"The Conservative and Liberal-Democrat parties are not viable alternatives to New Labour."
I have explainend why at length. How the general public votes is not the point, it reflects dysgenesis and egregious propaganda, hence my remark about popularity of astrology (a sign of irrationality).
hants_gw (#41) Yes, pretty much post-war Old Labour without the Trotskyite nonsence which damaged their credibility and with policies shaped by what we now know about human behaviour, especially education. As I see it, the USA did a very 'good' job of making Old Labour appear less viable than it really was, and it's now reaping the whirlwind as a consequence. Old Labour was, when it came down to what mattered, essentially 'National Socialist'/'Socialism in One Counry' as in 1930s Germany, the much maligned Stalinist USSR, and the PRC today. Getting more people to see this without their getting hysterical, is of course, very difficult given decades of Austrian School/Chicago School black propaganda and the de-nazification Collective Guilt Campaign which is still very much with us in support of Liberal-Democratic economic anarchism.
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#29 JadedJean: "you appear to think you already know what is important and what is not."
Oh JJ! You couldn't really make it up. If anyone on here has already decided what the answer is (a very unscientific attitude if ever there was one) it has to be you, don't you think? Do you not accept that there may be alternative explanations for the variability in IQ data other than the one you seem to have adopted (quite apart from the questionable status of the data itself)?
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Everyone I know who bought a home as a first time buyer in the 5 years up to 2007 did so on mortgages of between 6 and 9 times their annual salary, all these people have no money to spend out in the economy on goods and services because all their income each month goes on paying the mortgage and other bills. The worrying thing about what the government has said right from the start of this crisis is that all they need to do is pump enough taxpayers cash into the banking system so that lending and debt levels can get back to what they were in 2007 and everthing will be alright.
I think we are alone in all the major economies in the way we are laying the foundations of our recovery in the sense that we seem to be trying to reinflate our asset bubble, and any kind of argument will be employed by the politicians to justify this happening.
Look at what the FSA said today, banks have to lend more to companies but at the same time have to insure not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
With so much taxpayers money on the line, we have a right to know what is happening in our name!
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44 jj
Well lets just imagine the conservatives have won. You are saying the winning party is not viable. Really what you are saying is the democratic process is not viable. What you are saying is you want to see what you want running the show. Many individuals want that, that is why we have the democratic process, to stop them. I do not favour the undemocratic alternative thank you.
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No.46. muggwhump
I agree.
The sad irony is, taxpayer money will simply inflate the bad debts, as our government continues to encourage the banks to lend to unproductive businesses.....
If this were a short term 'normal' recession, where a bit of short term lending would dig businesses out of a hole, allowing those businesses to then repay the loans from future profits, the government's current strategy could work.
However, we are actually facing a long term economic slump, where over-supply and over-capacity mean that new lending will cause the fundamental problem of over-indebtedness and associated bad debts to get worse.....
The marginal productivity of debt is negative - ie more lending causes profits and the economy to shrink rather than expand.
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probablynogod (#45) "Do you not accept that there may be alternative explanations for the variability in IQ data other than the one you seem to have adopted (quite apart from the questionable status of the data itself)?"
No I don't at the moment. If there were credible alternatives, I'd have mentioned them. You certainly don't know of any, nor do you appear to know how research is done in science.
Is that a clear enough answer for you? You don't appear to understand what I am posting here for. You do appear to (rather idiotically in my view) want to be a member of the already too large Stephanie Flanders blog 'anarchists' club (no disrespect to Stephanie Flanders), which somewhat helps make my case for me.
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muggwhump (#46) Sadly (and it doesn't matter how often this is said, many won't accept it), in the Liberal-Democracies 'consumers' are treated as cash-cows/money pumps, and caveat emptor is used in a sinister way along with the myth of equality.
If people don't want to be ripped-off, so these predators assert, they should get themselves a better education or make better 'choices' etc, as it's a 'free-society' etc etc.
The flaw in that line should be clearer to all, but sadly isn't because a) ability is normally not uniformly distributed, and the facs are 'censored' by a carefully crafted and reinforced political correctness which serves predators very well by rubbishing the facts of the matter...
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Any space on your grassy knoll JadedJean?
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Steph,
Was the Treasury chart drempt up by that Government Minister who said
'If you stick your head in the freezer whilst standing in a bowl of boiling water, on the whole your overall temperature will be about average' 'Plus 5%, minus 10%, whatever.'
It was probably Cooper as she has no idea what goes on in the outside world
Anyway, can you do the same to whoever it was please?
Thanks
ps And the Government wonder why we don't trust any of their figures, predictions, projections, pronouncements, or any of the words they utter.
pps Nice bit of work by Bob Chote - tell him to take Monday off as reward.
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Message 39 glanafon
My nightmare is unemployment incrementing over time to somewhere between 4 or 5 million. It might even take a few years to get there. Under such circumstances we can either forget the minimum wage at its current level or inflate it down to nothing. Either way we have to find a means to get so many people back to work as they can't all be estate agents.
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The really scary policy for me is the Crosby report which the government slipped out in the budget with hardly any publicity whatsoever. With the taxpayer funding 20 billion of mortgage backed securities in the next 12 months you can't tell me they are doing that just to make it a little bit easier for people who can already afford a mortgage to buy into a falling market?
Of course not, it is in effect the governmemt pumping enough mortgage product onto the market to ensure property prices start rising again! By doing this the government is trying to control the price of housing in this country so that the banks can always lend to people using their positive equity as loan security safe in the knowledge that house prices will always be guarenteed never again to fall backed by taxpayers money! I don't know what you'd call it but it is neither capitalist nor socialist, honest or fair.
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#47 Glanafon - I see no evidence that the "democratic process" has served to stop certain interest groups from running the show.
Perhaps you can recall casting your vote to send your tax money to prop up Pol Pot. Or how about the popular vote to invade Iraq? Who voted for the particular model of globalisation whose primary purpose was to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy, whilst simultaneously lowering the average share of GDP available to wage earners.
Please tell me who voted for all of these things, I obviously missed the vote.
#46 Muggwhump "With so much taxpayers money on the line, we have a right to know what is happening in our name" Too right, just ask glanafon to explain - he will know because the democratic process mandates that he will know.
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Nobody knows what the future long-run growth in potential will be. We will, at best, only be able to guess in retrospect. Which makes life interesting for all economic commentators.
What really matters is that Governments try to steer even though they must do so without adequate information. And ensure that worldwide recessions like this one are dealt with quickly. We now know that UK retail sales held up much better than elesewhere and that, consequently, GDP growths have not declines as much as they might have. That speedy action last October is not yet acknowledged.
What Bankers and all others should learn from this crisis is not to trust the results of econometric models because they are inherently unreliable and unable to forecast the unpredictable changes in human sentiments. But they should be used as guides to what's going wrong, or gone wrong.
Eventually pessimism will fade and borrowers and lenders will emerge. That will be sooner if government keeps intervening to sustain demand. Being sooner will enable corporate profits to be made and taxes collected on them. That - and the recovery in bank share values - will help us pay down the debts we've had to take on to avoid us all going bankrupt. This rescue of markets is not a physics equation where inputs can equal outputs. Lots of guesswork by HM Treasury is needed, and lots of difficult and uncertaint decisions taken as the rescue unfolds. Commentators merely criticise and offer few useful insights.
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PPP/PFI??
muggwhump (#54) There are private property mortgages and there are commercial property mortgages.
What was the incentive for those private sector borrowers from banks in the mortgaging back of (inner city and elsewhere) Public Sector property, such as schools, hospitals etc?
Joe/Jamal Adams/Ahmad next door make a nice focus/distraction, but was that really what this has ever been about? Even when it comes to domestic dwellings, they're not just bought to live in, they're bought as Buy-To-Let...
We have a Below Replacement Level TFR for the indigenous population too...
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VinChainSaw (#51) You, like so many, clearly have much to unlearn... ;-)
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53 stanilic
The prospects are quite feudal on the downside. Being unemployed is not working so the minimum wage does not apply. However being unemployed also requires claimants are engaged variously in on the job placements for experience, training which is a loose description, voluntary work. It was postulated a long time ago that in technically advanced society an unemployment rate of 8 percent was to be expected. I cannot give a link, it was pre internet, 70s and 80s when the impact of low labour zones and IT where first being discussed. However you cannot have millions of people claiming benefit and creating a black market so unemployment if anything will become more regulated. If you have all those unemployed workers then how long before they are used to take over public sector work. If there are not the jobs it doesnt really matter how much grooming of the unemployed you do the problem remains. The social and welfare system is not designed to cope with these sort of problems.
If unemployment freewheels upwards then unless employment picks significantly up the whole taxation system runs into problems as tax take is 46 percent (plus PPP and PFI) so services have to contract and means testing has to be expanded. There is effectively already a 5 percent budget contraction needed based on the treasury figure of a one off drop of 5 percent following browns froth, let alone problems due to an increased welfare bill.
Existing long term debt in housing continues, it has notthing to do with property values damping down disposable income. Graduate debt will affect many.
The low wage zone will not disappear further undermining growth. there are a lot of very poor people in the world ready to do the work and the model is proven. Technology sadly tends to be commercialised, which is the important bit - commercialised, most effectively in the US. China will move up the technology ladder providing further pressure. Multinationals, gnerally, keep the IP and knowhow at home reducing the R and D base. Low overheads, the internet, flexible smart processing, culturally driven output is the main opportunity.
I find it hard to argue with your upside unemployment figure. We are having forecasts of job losses of 1.5 million approx 2008 to 2010 basically from the private sector, from a base point of 1.8 million. Nobody is saying anything about public sector job losses, its taboo. But there will be some and there could be quite a lot. You could even have them being made jobless then placed back in the sector on work experience on benefit.
I knew a highly qualified finance director of a major comapny who got kicked out after a coupe. He could not get employment and ended up giving his work away to the voluntary sector and living on benefit and savings. The mechanism is like musical chairs. Get a chair get a job. No chair no job. Music still playing. Or build your own chair is an option.
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55 armagediontimes
I agree.
The only solution I can see is improving the feedback loop on the Democratic process via digital democracy. So they can't just go and do what they want once elected. I cannot see any other possible improvement in the system. depends how it goes with BO in the US, he is supposed to be trying to move in that direction. Sorry gotta go.
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One of those "macro-prudential indicators" you might have thought to look at could be the Government current account deficit. Since 2001 Brown hasn't balanced a budget and over the seven years to 2008 he borrowed over £180 billion. Since then, he's really got going.
He didn't just fail to fix the roof when the sun was shining, he was up there kicking the tiles off!
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Once the pied piper of Sedgfield made it clear that it was ok to fill butts with wrigglies, it became inevitable that the nations financial system was fated to be turned into an enormous AAA's hole backed by the taxipayerrs , they now boast that the orbit of Uranus will never be the same again .
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Surely no sensible person can believe the first table, ie the arguement that the economy was not overheating and the crisis was a bolt from the blue. What a cop out for government.
Surely the reality is that the credit crunch was caused by rapid expansion of the secondary, offshore, banking system due to imprudent and unregulated lending. At it's height this created as much credit in the world economy as the primary system and when, inevitably, the bubble burst its impact on the primary banking system was catastrophic.
That huge bubble of credit caused unsustainable increases in asset values, particularly housing but also in company valuations and buy outs and in commodities. Those increases were well known and well documented, not least of all by the Bank of England.
For the government now to argue that there was no boom and attempt to reinvent economic reality is unbelievable. It is patently true, and again not just with hindsight, that the government were not exercising due prudence at that point in the cycle and were not building up reserves.
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Working in the manufacturing sector, I can't say I noticed either a boom or steady growth over the past 6 years or so. It's been more one long struggle to keep afloat.
Maybe a better way to look at things is that the supposed wealth created by the financial sector over the past decade was just a fabrication - a mirage. They didn't actually contribute to GDP, they just printed money for themselves, creating a huge asset bubble in the process.
If you plot a similar graph of GDP less the profits (and now losses) of the financial sector, I think you will find there was no boom. and not such a big bust. The problem is the accrued wealth and debt that has built up in the process. What's needed now is a redistribution of wealth (and writing off of debt) to put things back in balance. I suppose heafty dose of inflation would do the trick, though it would be much cleaner and fairer to do it through the taxation system.
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We had a credit boom, Simple. There can be no denying it. Governments and Banks debase our money by constantly expanding the money supply in concert. We will always have boom and bust. The credit crunch is just the market trying to amend this excessive monetary expansion. Should we fear deflation - no. Deflation would solve many social issues and make us all a lot better off. As long as we have credit booms we will always have poverty as the government robs its citizens.
People say the financial crisis is the fault of the market, but its government that has caused the bubble economy we see. They have a monopoly on the money supply and will continue to do so. Unless we give it, once more back to the market like it was in Britain 200 years ago.
http://theageofstupidity.blogspot.com/2009/02/fallacies-of-deflation.html
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I would harbour a guess that Graph No.1 is the product of the fevered minds of the Politicians at the treasury and Graph No.2 would be the efforts of the impartial Civil Servants at the Treasury.
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GROSS DOMESTICPRODUCT
It says it all really. Actually, the film 'The Believer', said a lot too. Some people are inevitably, and quite rightly, worried about what's going to fill the gap :-(
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#60 glanafon. Mr. Obama is unlikely to solve any problems. Take a look at the differences in his policies to those of GWB.
Bush wanted to give large amounts of taxpayerts money to Wall Street. Obama wants to give large amounts of taxpayers money to Wall Street. Bush used the conduit of Paulson (ex Goldman Sachs) to deliver the cash to the greedy. Obama is using the conduit of Geithner (ex Goldman Sachs) to deliver the cash to the greedy.
Bush wanted to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama wants to disengage with Iraq and beef up the commitment to Afghanistan and to threaten Pakistan.
Bush supported a bunch of wahabbist lunatics in Saudi Arabia - Obama supports a bunch of wahabbist lunatics in Saudi Arabia.
Maybe the French can help. Dominique de Villepin has today warned of the revolutionary risk in France.
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67 jj
The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.'' Kahlil Gibran
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#53 Stanilic. It can be evidenced that in the UK 9 million people of working age are not working. Whatever else these 9 million people may be they are unemployed.
On what basis can you postulate that it may take a few years to reach an unemployment level of 4 to 5 million?
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68 arm n leg times
If better communication does not work then I can see no other route. Do you have any alternatives.
I don't know where the idea has ever come from that the exploitation of the population is something new. It is devil take the hindmost, it always has been. You either let somebody exploit you or you exploit yourself.
The french always are more active. It is one thing to have revolution in the 1780s and quite another thing today. If the key is high unemployment in an EU country then Spain is a potential hot spot. I do not have much expectation in this area, if it ever gets really bad the majority will accept that the minority pay the cost and see force used if necessary. Now where did that happen. Its like a minor operation, the only person who has a minor operation is someone else. Its where you are in the picture for most people. Redundancy followed by lifelong unemployment for somebody who has worked and wants to work is little different than a psycholgical Aztec sacrifice ritual. Both are localised both are dehumanising and both are done for the 'benefit' of the majority. Not as bad as sending kids into a pointless war.
The Pakistan thing is a logical development of a bad strategy. Make it bad in Afghanistan so what happens they just move along a bit, they are just mountains. And in the meantime the war breeds more converts. I can't think of a better motivation for trouble than foreigners going around killing somebodies relatives. This is the same madness as Vietnam. If the US had given the money spent on the war to the locals instead of going to war they would have all been capitalists.
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70 arm n leg times
As the projection is 50 percent of the population will be of retirement age in a few decades (2050) you can use any figure you want. I have used the same figures because that is the conventional framework. The issue is the shrinking workforce that creates the wealth cannot supply the tax revenue that the majority want for the services they wish to see, and are stridently demanding. The majority being outside the private sector - either in the public sector consuming the 46 pence in the pound total taxation or the economically unproductive group wishing to consume services. Why do you think most countries will welcome somebody who can be self employed or bring a business with them to provide employment. You dont really need to know the categories all you have to do is look at the numbers due to be out of work, and the tax take which has now to fall based on th size of the economy. Everything is pushing in the wrong direction. And young professionals are leaving.
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#71 glanafon. Communication may work - but not at the level you appear to think. It has to be more grassroots and the people need to realise the power they have.
Take big supermarkets, a lot of people don´t like them. The answer is simple - just don´t buy anything from them, and they will be gone inside a month. Obviously the people that do not like supermarkets are in a minority. I believe there is a compelling argument against them - if that argument can be successfully made they will go. If it cannot be made they will stay - that is the power of communication and democracy. The dice is loaded - supermarkets spend millions in advertising, those who argue against them basically spend nothing. The internet can potentially offset this monetary advantage. Time will tell.
I´m not sure that exploitation is the natural human default. I try not to exploit people - although I have in the course of my working life. But I did that because I was paid to do it. A bit like a soldier who kills people in war - doesn´t mean he will kill someone he meets in the street. It is complex, I don´t know, maybe you are right, but I hope not.
Not much chance of a revolution in Spain. The memory of a previous regime is still close to the surface. The Spanish play both ends against the middle. See them on the international stage and they pay homage to the Anglo-American model, see them at home and they look after each other. Unemployment in Spain is not necessarily like unemployment in the UK - there are plenty of things in Spain that are free - good weather, beaches, the family. This all affords flexibility that is not so easy to find in the UK. There are not that many big companies in Spain (Telefonica, Repsol, Santander, Iberdrola, BBVA - and then you struggle). This has an effect.
There is an old card school saying: "There is always a fool in every game, if you don´t know who it is then it is probably you." Take a look at what is going on in Afghanistan/Pakistan and tell me who is the fool in that game.
I have been to a lot of places in this world - and pretty close to the bottom of my list not to return to is Pakistan. If the US/UK get sucked in then there is little hope. All my predictions will come true. If we have any self determination now is the time to disengage from Pakistan. Maybe it is written, I know it is not logical, but then what we are doing now is not logical either.
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#58 and 67 JadedJean:.
'The Perfect Storm' - looks like something that Brown and (especially) Blair would agree with entirely, and have done something about. Have you looked at a primary school in this country lately?
I am shocked to see no mention of dysgenics in the ETS film. Wonder why not.
Standing by for the next amusing salvo of personal invective, based on inadequate information and incorrect assumptions about my real (not pseudo) scientific credentials.
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#73 armagediontimes:
I can sympathise with what you are saying in the seccond part of your comment, but I think you ignore the fact that Pakistan has the Bomb. Don't you think that might affect our attitude?
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glanafon (#69) One for your quote repertoire? ;-)....
"I comment on verbal behaviour posted by you and others, the person per se does not come into it except as source of that behaviour, hence the remarks about the invalidity of the ad hominem(in all its forms)."
JadedJean
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probablynogod (#74)
"'The Perfect Storm' - looks like something that Brown and (especially) Blair would agree with entirely, and have done something about. Have you looked at a primary school in this country lately?"
Yes.
"I am shocked to see no mention of dysgenics in the ETS film. Wonder why not."
I'll tell you. Those who know this field (and who prompted ETS), know that this is chapter 15 of 'The Bell Curve' by Herrnstein and Murray (1994), which has a long history which goes back to the beginning of The London School early last century.
"Standing by for the next amusing salvo of personal invective, based on inadequate information and incorrect assumptions about my real (not pseudo) scientific credentials."
My assessment is both sound and just based on your impudent postings to date. You need to grasp that, and you need to show more respect for what you do not understand.
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What strikes me about the graphs is this:
1. In Chart 2, the area between the "long term trend" and "actual growth" lines from 1997 and 2005 represents the extra wealth put into the economy. This wealth was added by the "false boom".
2. Similarly, the area below the "long term trend" line for the years of recession represents the amount chalked off our long term wealth.
It seems very clear that this theory of how it will go will mean that we will keep most of the gains of the "false boom" and continue serenely in short order. Although it purports to attack the government, it is actually on all fours with their complacent predictions.
Besides, if this is just a correction for a false boom, would not those countries who didn't have their economies inflated by debt (ie: countries with no boom or a true boom) be immune from the disasters.
What I want to know is why is Britain statistically doing well in comparison to others? Given that our economy was one of the most debt dependent, it is hard to see why we should be paying our way so well? I know the world is not fair, but this seems bizarre.
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76 jadejean
No, post 69 is pertinent, your postings are very revealing, particularly what you do not say and what you do not respond to when placed alongside what you do say and do respond to. There are issues you do not wish to comment on despite the fact that you cannot normally wait to have a go, to treat people as patsy by repetitively posting comments from an identifable cascade menu. Now why could that be. But you appear to think you are intelligent, you work it out. ; )
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glanafon (#79) "There are issues you do not wish to comment on despite the fact that you cannot normally wait to have a go, to treat people as patsy by repetitively posting comments from an identifable cascade menu."
I'm educating you (or others, it doesn't matter which). You should be grateful. At present your behaviour indicates that you are not. This indicates that you are counter-productively making matters harder for yourself. That's not very smart or helpful to others - maybe you can't help yourself ;-).
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Keep it up Steph, even if, like me, some people may find all the graphs and figures hard to follow, one thing is certain; every dog has its day, and western man's day is ending. Perhaps a study of the fall of the landed gentry in this country will give a good representation of what is happening to the UK now. Just how long we can walk around wearing clothes, listening to electical appliances, using tools and a whole lot of other things made in some factory abroad, all bought with foreign money on tick, I just don't know. But when it does end the fun will certainly start.
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73 arm n leg times
I did not wish to see the Iraq activity and I thought Afghanistan was a basket case. Paddy Ashdown is reported as advised that he thought it would be surgical, a quick in and out. I preferred to look at Ghengis Khan - he had a cup of tea and asked to go through, Alexander the Great - he had the equivalent of a quick arm wrestle and off - left them to it, and the USSR - long term problems. History says 2 reknown successful military leaders both judged it better not to engage, whilst a 3rd military power chose to go head on and lost. That is without the British Great Game experience in the area in the nineteenth century. If I did not think we should be in Afghanistan it leads me to thinking we should not be in Pakistan. Being seen as a Little America has done enormous damage, but Blair is still adulated by some.
Call it what it is - credit is debt, work is exploitation. There is nothing wrong with either as long as you know what you are dealing with and set boundaries.
The corporate use of financally advantage to acheive their dominance is a problem. The only thing that even starts to redress the balance is communication. If democracy leads to elected parties ignoring manifestos and doing what they want once in place in what way does having a non democractic system solve this. In a non democratic system getting rid of the incumbent is difficult. The issue is trying to make democracy more not less accountable. Why should it be easy. Didnt I see somewhere that people spend more time on the internet than watching tv. Doesnt that point to opportunity. The fact there is such establishment alarm at an unfettered internet is telling.
Things to do so I am off.
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78 forestz
It is easier to write off debt than cope with a collapsing manufacturing base in a short period. Manufacture requires longterm investment and skill. Look at the ratio between say a product line - say 5 million capital plant for a 80 quid product. The customer gets a great deal, if you only sell one you take a near 5 million hit. If the customer is in trouble his loss is limited to the 80 quid he borrowed to buy the item. The short term senario does not tell the whole story because long term manufacturing is needed. The structural problems still remain. Why do you think there is such alarm about car makers folding and why is it so difficult to justify bailing them out, it is because the sums are massive and long term you need work for people. So countries that are involved in manufacture and export have real problems short term. That doesnt make us better placed, it just means there are more in the same boat and it is still slowly sinking. Apologies but I have to go.
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#72 glanafon - Have you been captured by Jadedjean? This argument is rubbish.
I point out that today we have 9 million people of working age who are not working, and you start worrying about the future effects of a shrinking workforce relative to total population.
If you cannot use, or do not want, the resources available to you today then how can there be a problem if those resources diminish over time?
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#80 Jadedjean - You are not educating anyone. You keep repeating the same message. You never explain in clear terms the benefits and dis-benefits of your position, and you never address perfectly reasonable questions as to the implications of your message.
Rather you respond to any criticism with, as post #74 points out, a "salvo of personal invective, based on inadequate information and incorrect assumptions..."
You do not educate people by attempting to bully, harangue and bludgeon people into submission. The great irony is of course your professed concern with declining educational standards.
Unlike you I try to recognise that I could be wrong. If a great number of people write in to say that they think you are a great educator, then I will of course review my position. Somehow I think I´m on solid ground
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armagediontimes (#85) "You are not educating anyone.
Speak for yourself. It's safer/more accurate ;-).
"You keep repeating the same message."
But you're not grasping it. Practice makes perfect. Most learning is a matter of repetition.
"You never explain in clear terms the benefits and dis-benefits of your position,"
False. You also need to learn new terms.
"and you never address perfectly reasonable questions as to the implications of your message."
I know how to recognise reasonable behavior. When I see it, I respond to it accordingly. Similarly, when I see unreasonable behaviour I respond to it appropriately.
"Rather you respond to any criticism with, as post #74 points out, a "salvo of personal invective, based on inadequate information and incorrect assumptions..."
It's called correction.
"You do not educate people by attempting to bully, harangue and bludgeon people into submission."
Some people are not educable. Some are narcissists, others SEN, Oppositionally Defiant (when children), soem just not very bright etc).
"The great irony is of course your professed concern with declining educational standards."
Standards are declining because the mean cognitive ability of the people is declining. One can't make silk purses out of sows' ears. Standards trail this dysgenesis. It isn't the fault of the educators, it's politicans' policies which bring this about.
"Unlike you I try to recognise that I could be wrong."
You are not doing that very well.
"If a great number of people write in to say that they think you are a great educator, then I will of course review my position. Somehow I think I'm on solid ground."
I strongly suggest otherwise. Firstly, how would you ever know? Secondly, and relatedly, you can't base the truth/falsehood or validity of my (or anyone else's) posts on what most people think.
You really do need to look into why that is so, so do many people these days.
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Ms. Flanders
Thank you, and the IFS, for showing us this element in how we got into quite such a fiscal mess.
Gordon Brown's choice (it would have been his personal choice, at the remote upper end of the range that the Treasury officials thought plausible) of assuming 3.5% per year growth potential looked like wishful thinking at the time. I was relieved when he later lowered the estimate. However, I simply failed to spot how completely it distorted his across-the-cycle Budget rules and arithmetic. He could only indulge in opening the spending taps, while appearing to stay within his rules of prudence, because of that past over-estimation of growth potential.
My guess is that he fooled himself; and refused to listen to anyone who warned him.
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I think the current crisis is not a result of typical boom and bust cycle. It is a result of the collapse of the financial pyramid like in Albania in 1996 - 1997. Therefore Ms Flanders' analysis seems somewhat vacuous to me.
You can read more about the current budget at "A horror budget" and follow further analysis on "Financial crisis? It's a pyramid, stupid." blog.
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84 armagediontimes
''I point out that today we have 9 million people of working age who are not working, and you start worrying about the future effects of a shrinking workforce relative to total population.
If you cannot use, or do not want, the resources available to you today then how can there be a problem if those resources diminish over time?''
You will never employ all the resources available. The 9 million you quote presumably includes incapacity claimants who are determined by searching statute and structured medical examination as being unable to work. It is easier to use the measurement of JSA claimants. it does not matter if the figures are cooked, they are still an indicator. The key issue is the growth in imbalances.
The issue is the reduction of available work in the economy. This is mainly driven by low labour zones taking work away. There is also a technology impact.
Many of retirement age want to work but cannot get work because of their age. In terms of the JSA figures in what way is this any different than the redundant person who elects not to claim JSA because their redundancy pay off and or savings are too large to allow a cash benefit claim and therefore is not in the JSA figures. That is why I said you can pick any figure you want. You can. That does not mean the JSA figure is not useful. Your 9 million figure is weaker than the JSA figure. The JSA figure is people who are out of work, want work, and have no other money.
There are several factors at play -
Technology producing goods more efficently and with a long functional life.
Low cost labour zones taking work away.
An aging population.
High expectations in service provision.
Higher costs in health intervention.
There are others but those will do. They have been a cause for concern for decades.
If you have the bulk of the population not involved in wealth creation but demanding public services via the democratic system but paid for by the minority you have a time bomb. People will leave and take work and their tax payments with them. Its happening.
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jadejean various
This ETS you keep going on about as providing guidance.
Their number one bullet point is -
'Listening to educators, parents and critics'
Please note the 'critics'. You are never too old to learn. ; )
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jadejean
There is a dangerous tendency to assume that when people use the same words, they perceive a situation in the same way. This is rarely the case. Once one gets beyond a dictionary definitiona meaning that is often of little practical valuethe meaning we assign to a word is a belief, not an absolute fact.
In ancient Greece, Socrates argued that education was about drawing out what was already within the student. (As many of you know, the word education comes from the Latin e-ducere meaning "to lead out.") At the same time, the Sophists, a group of itinerant teachers, promised to give students the necessary knowledge and skills to gain positions with the city-state.
There is a dangerous tendency to assume that when people use the same words, they perceive a situation in the same way. This is rarely the case. Once one gets beyond a dictionary definitiona meaning that is often of little practical valuethe meaning we assign to a word is a belief, not an absolute fact. Here are a couple of examples.
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. ~Eric Hoffer
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. ~Emma Goldman
The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort. ~Ayn Rand
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to thinkrather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men. ~Bill Beattie
The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions. ~Bishop Creighton
The central job of schools is to maximize the capacity of each student. ~Carol Ann Tomlinson
These quotations demonstrate the diversity of beliefs about the purpose of education. How would you complete the statement, "The purpose of education is..."? If you ask five of your fellow teachers to complete that sentence, it is likely that you'll have five different statements. Some will place the focus on knowledge, some on the teacher, and others on the student. Yet people's beliefs in the purpose of education lie at the heart of their teaching behaviors.
I 'd love to read your reactions :)
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glanafon (#90) "'Listening to educators, parents and critics'"
This, sadly, is advice ETS which needs to take :-(. They did not orignate this research they just reported/supplemented it.....in the original feb 2007 video they acknowledged this.
ETS promised a White Paper when they went public in Feb 2007. That has not appeared to the best of my knowledge.
Can you work out, from that I have posted, why that may be so?
You presume far too much, and you are learning far too slowly. The two often go hand in hand....
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glowingHorizon (#91) "There is a dangerous tendency to assume that when people use the same words, they perceive a situation in the same way. This is rarely the case."
Hence the frequent Quine references and criticism of intension/Natural Language.
"In ancient Greece, Socrates argued that education was about drawing out what was already within the student. (As many of you know, the word education comes from the Latin e-ducere meaning "to lead out.") At the same time, the Sophists, a group of itinerant teachers, promised to give students the necessary knowledge and skills to gain positions with the city-state."
Excellent! The latter are the progenitors of the Neoconservative New Labour/Conservative/Liberal-Democrat anarchists.
Most of the quotes you cite are, in my view, at root anarchistic/sophist/neo-liberal pro free-market ideology. Teaching in the Liberal-Democracies is very badly taught. Few teachers understand how behavioural plasticity works, less so today than they did a generation or two ago for what should be obvious reasons, but are not to many :-(.
Operants are driven by genetic expression, and shaped by their consequences. Reinforcement just describes changes in rates of emitted behaviours.
Quine and Skinner were Tweedledum and Tweedledee - third audio. If you can dig out Skinner's audio 'On Having a Poem' it's priceless (sadly removed from the web recently, but the text is in Cumulative Record).
I hope that answers your question ;-)
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Stephanie,
The narrative arc being pushed by GB and the chairman of the treasury select committee (John McFail) is that the recession is a direct result of bankers failing to manage risk and general incompetence in the financial sector and that the government fiscal and monetary policies pursued by GB were sound and not a contributing factor. Whilst, I accept that the banking sector and its regulators in both the US and UK had a major part to play in this disaster I find the attempts to spin the failure of GBs monetary and fiscal policies and the attempts to rewrite history by GB and the treasury as objectionable.
I find it hard to accept that GB was not aware that his fiscal and monetary policies were the cause an unsustainable boom that would result in the inevitable bust whilst CPI inflation was low RPI having been discarded - the money supply ( M3)and consequently debt were expanding at 10 to 15% a year over the period.
The fact that you have highlighted the IFS analysis that exposes the lie hopefully neuters some of GBs and tresury spin. However, it could be argued that GB was still unaware of the consequences of his policies and that he really was deluded enough to believe that he had found the silver bullet that had eliminated boom and bust. However this extract below sheds some light on what some members of the MPC were concerned about in 2005
.Extract of Speech by Kate Barker member of BOE Monetary Policy Committee Monetary framework and current issues Washington DC On Monday 21 March 2005
.
The asset price issue
While questions about trade-offs and communication are important, a criticism that would be
more significant if justified is that central banks do not pay enough attention to asset prices.
In the four years since I joined the UKs MPC, we have been criticized for allowing the
exchange rate to remain too strong, and more recently for permitting a bubble to develop in
the housing market (several commentators remain concerned that there is a risk of a
widespread downturn when this possible bubble bursts). In general, I consider there are good
reasons for not acting to offset movements in asset prices per se. The first is the considerable
uncertainty about whether or not a bubble exists and if it does, how serious it is.
For example, while UK house prices are certainly at historically high levels at present,
relative to incomes, there are factors which support an increased equilibrium price: lower
interest rates lowering the initial cost of a mortgage; low long-term real interest rates (which
have increased the asset value of housing); an inadequate supply of new build; increased use
of housing as a savings vehicle for pensions. There are some signs which might indicate a
housing bubble increased private buying of housing for letting with the expectation of
capital gain, and parents using equity from their own homes to assist children with deposits
but it is not clear how far these may have contributed to higher prices. So it would also not be
clear what scale of adjustment in house prices monetary policy should seek to achieve.
7
More importantly, a shift to targeting asset prices might result in significant changes of
interest rates away from the level which would be appropriate to achieve the inflation target.
This is likely to create uncertainty about what the aims of monetary policy are, and lead to
volatile inflation expectations. In particular, there is a risk that the central bank would end up
chasing one asset price after another, with real costs in terms of uncertain strategy similar
indeed to the problems experienced in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.
Concluding that asset prices should not be targeted does not of course mean that their impact
on the economy and the related risk of volatility can be ignored. As suggested by fellow
MPC member Charlie Bean, concerns about major economic volatility which could result
from a bubble deflating is a factor which should be taken into account in discussing risks
around a central forecast, and therefore could have some effect on current decisions4. In
practice this means giving a bit more weight to possible major deviations from the inflation
target which might be beyond the usual policy horizon of around two years ahead.
The worry about house prices reflects a view that the low level of inflation over the past few
years is partly due to external factors (the strong exchange rate and very weak world goods
price inflation). The consequent low nominal interest rates may have encouraged consumers
to increase debt burdens to unsustainable levels, due to unrealistic income expectations. In
the UK the household savings rate has declined from around 9-11% in the early 1990s to
around 6% in 1998, below the 8% average since 1963. But since 2000 it has remained
broadly stable, and consumer spending has moved generally in line with income growth. It
seems equally likely that most of the rise in debt has resulted from more stable economic
conditions in the UK, with strong competition among loan providers enabling more effective
consumption smoothing for those with sound long-term income prospects. Alongside this
there are a number of low income households whose debt levels pose real problems.
So if the MPC were expressing concerns about the asset bubble in 2005 but were unsure how to respond are we then to believe that neither the tresury or GB were aware of the problem of the asset bubble - or did they just hope that it would go away.
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JadedJean# 93
Thanks for your answer
Teaching in the Liberal-Democracies is very badly taught.
I have to unfortunately concur with your statement, however it is not only in so called Liberal-Democraties( Elected Particracies).
The Socrates approach of: Stimulus- Probabilities of responses-Responses should idealize toward a higher consciousness, however the computing model (Input-Output) prone by the Sophists is far more constrictive. And supported to structure any societiesbehaviours. (Believes, social code, superstitions etc) since the dawn of human kind.
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#86 Jadedjean. I will know whether or not people write in to say that they think you are a great educator by reading published entries. Providing you know how to read it is not so difficult, and I would have thought a fairly non-controversial test.
Of course I can base the validity of your claim to be an educator on what most people think. If they have learned something from you then you have succeeded, if they have not then you have failed. (Even if they are too narcissistic or too stupid to learn from you, you have still failed since you are aiming your message at the wrong target audience).It is the only test.
Here is your chance to educate me. You keep bemoaning the lack of intelligence in the population, and claim that all kinds of problems exist as a consequence of declining IQ levels. So tell me, Jeff Skilling of Enron has a very high IQ, and took care to surround himself with other high IQ individuals, so how did Enron benefit you, me or society in general?
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#89 glanafon - If it does not matter whether the figures are cooked, then why is so much effort, and (dare I say it) intelligence devoted to cooking the figures?
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glowingHorizon (#95) It is fundamentally (i.e radically) important to note that the EAB (Behaviour Analytic/Operant) approach is R-S* not S-R (cf. the first two audios).
This entire approach is descriptive of what happens and is as politically incorrect as psychometrics - and that's no coincidence in my view.
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# 98 JadedJean
It is fundamentally (i.e radically) important to note that the EAB (Behaviour Analytic/Operant) approach is R-S* not S-R (cf. the first two audios).
yes,It does make sense that the EAB is R-S looking from the biological paradigm, because it is already encoded. However looking from the Quantum physic it does not not make sense. How can can explain it?
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97 arm n leg times
In order to see the current problem all that is important is the growth in the numbers of people within the JSA framework. In order to see the long term problem all you have to do is look at the likely trends and imbalances. I agree there are considerably more people wanting work but who are not on the JSA figures, then there are those in a twilight zone where they are working but cannot live on the income so they recieve effectively a benefit, eg tax credit, 16 hours per week at the min wage qualifies for tax credit and JSA claimants are pushed that way if possible. The more you expand away from the JSA figures the less certainity there is. You can soon see why Brown, and Thatcher, come to that, did what they did but it didnt work and they believed their own story. The underlying structual problems just keep growing. It is jumping in a descending lift. Meanwhile here we have growth and more work than we can handle. What we do was structured for this environment after the 1990s gig. As I have said before, it is not an issue to me if I am right or wrong on general issues. I just comment based on my experience and what I believe I have seen.
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94 tao-das
This highlights the problems of using interest rates as the main tool (let alone taking house inflation out of the formula). Lawson (late 80s) proposed trying to have two interest rates, one short term and the other long term (mortgages) but it was abandoned promptly as being unworkable. As trying to control inflation and housing at the same time is not workable there obviously needs to be other tools, eg old fashioned banking criteria. It still does not excuse UK banks buying bad stuff in the US, and it is obvious that somebody somewhere in these banks kept raising difficult questions, and where told to shut up, we will worry about it tomorrow.
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armagediontimes (#96) "I will know whether or not people write in to say that they think you are a great educator by reading published entries. Providing you know how to read it is not so difficult, and I would have thought a fairly non-controversial test."
No you won't, as that's not how people representatively behave. Even if it was, it would still be irrelevant, as truth is not determined by populist opinion.
Do you not understand why popular surveys are so often irrelevant other than as measures of populist (usually ill-informed) opinion?
This is why liberal-democracy is radically flawed (especially when there is evidence of dysgenesis).
I fear you may be ineducable.
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COUNTERFACTUAL vs. MATERIAL CONDITIONALS/CONTINGENCIES
glowingHorizon (#99) "However looking from the Quantum physic it does not not make sense. How can can explain it?"
That's because here, 'quantum physics' is irrelevant. It's domain of application is pragmatically different.
What I've said is empirically descriptive. We can not raise intelligence through education. If one increases the number of low ability people in a population (ceteris paribus), one will lower the general (mean) ability of that population, and in time, its GDP.
Now, before you or anyone else says 'yes but if...' like Vicky Pollard.. just remember, 'if pigs had wings they might fly' ;-).
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#102 Jadedjean. Good to see the propensity for false attribution does not not desert you - even when dealing with quite trivial matters.
To repeat; I made the claim that I would know whether or not people write in to say whether they think you are a great educator by reading published entries. The only way that this statement could not be true would be if I could not read. I can read, hence the statement is true.
I did not say anything at all as to whether this would be relevant, representative or a method for establishing the truth. Only you have said these things.
The only reason I made the statement in the first place was in order to answer your question embedded in the penultimate paragraph of your post #86. If the narrowness and tautological nature of the answer displeases you then perhaps you should consider the question that prompted the answer.
Unlike you I attempt to deal with all questions raised, and avoid resorting to dissembling and false attribution.
I note that the subject of Enron remains off your particular list of issues to address - a cynic may suggest that is because you do not specialise in dealing with issues.
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#101 glanafon - It may also highlight the problems of fiddling the figures so as to produce an inflation rate well below the level of inflation that actually pertains in the general economy. Just like fiddling the unemployment figures may lead to some false conclusions being drawn. I know you like this kind of stuff, so try this
"Oh what a tangled web we wreave when at first we practice to deceive"
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armagediontimes (#104) You do not appear to even understand what you have written, never mind what others write.
Let me try to make this clearer:
You write at (#104) "Good to see the propensity for false attribution does not not desert you - even when dealing with quite trivial matters.
To repeat; I made the claim that I would know whether or not people write in to say whether they think you are a great educator by reading published entries. The only way that this statement could not be true would be if I could not read. I can read, hence the statement is true.
I did not say anything at all as to whether this would be relevant, representative or a method for establishing the truth. Only you have said these things."
Leaving aside the patent absurdity of that assertion, let's look at what you actually wrote at (#96)
"I will know whether or not people write in to say that they think you are a great educator by reading published entries. Providing you know how to read it is not so difficult, and I would have thought a fairly non-controversial test.
Of course I can base the validity of your claim to be an educator on what most people think. If they have learned something from you then you have succeeded, if they have not then you have failed."
So, from the above, is it not rational to conclude that you are
a) unable to appreciate the falsifty of truth being determined by populism (not to mention that people don't have insight into their own learning much of the time, so one can't go by what they 'think' - it's why we test/examine people rather than just ask them, after all)
b) and that you are either:
i) unable to accurately state what you have publicly asserted, or
ii) that you egregiously recall only selective parts of what you post in an effort to (rather ineptly) deceive?
My point is not to humiliate you, but to point out that such behaviour is all common these days (and it's reflected in all sorts of measures, from the crime rate to dumb-down tests).
People appear ever more not to make an effort not to learn from their mistakes, but to justify their errors instead. This narcissism is anathema to clear, intelligent expression/practice, and, writ large, to social, political, and economic stability (see the ETS video, Leitch Review etc).
Do you not see how this is, writ large, a worrying sign of our anarchistic/dysgenic times? If you don't, please look back at the posts and links.
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"So tell me, Jeff Skilling of Enron has a very high IQ, and took care to surround himself with other high IQ individuals, so how did Enron benefit you, me or society in general?"
Intelligence is a necesary, but not sufficient condition. One other class of behaviours required is 'conscienciousness' (this also appears to be subject to dysgenesis). If you had diligently followed what I'd posted on the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B Personality Disorders (like ASPD nd NPD) and their prevalence in the Financial Service Sector, you would have known this. Instead you chose to defiantly argue... Hence my remark about ineducability.
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* 103. JadedJean
What I've said is empirically descriptive. We can not raise intelligence through education.
Through sophisme education perspective I will tend to agree with you.
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#106 Jadedjean. You are still doing it wrong (although this time I suspect not deliberately).
I made both of the statements that you quote and I made them in response to two discrete questions embedded in the penultimate paragraph of your post #86. I therefore made two discrete responses. At no point did I say that I can determine what most people think, or whether people have learned anything from you, on the basis of published responses on this (or any other blog). To do so would be palpably absurd.
So; In answer to your question: No it is not rational to draw any of the conclusions that you do.
Do you have any thoughts as to the benefits of the above average intelligence of Mr. Skilling?
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106 jj
Forgive me jj, but didnt you declare you had educated the Heathen only for him to protest otherwise. Surely this points to the fact that what you think you read is not what is always written? But keep on its a good larf. You are reverting to long words again, you need to polish your nefarious rhetoric dude if you want your message spread about. I am also interested in you statement that you wish to educate. Who do you wish to educate. I assume you think the thickos are not suitable for this event so that would point to a certain IQ in your terms, your getting all rarified again. What is your threshold on this so I can see if I meet it. Wot a larf, I would be absolutely devastated if I wasnt up to your standard. BTW I found it curious that you repeatedly refer to this ETS outfit and then claim they have got something wrong because it does nay fit with your outlook. But keep it up dude, get down with the nefarious. I can almost see you with your cap on back to front and your pants hangin low. ; )
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106
Can't say I agree with most of the things you say, but you do make some interesting points.
It strikes me as somewhat ironic that as children we are taught that we should admit mistakes and bring them out into the open as the way to move forwards, whereas as adults in todays society it seems to be the opposite.
I believe the increasing culture of spin, both in business and politics is highly damaging to society.
A few years ago I moved from a small business, where I was respected for my actual talents, to a large one, where people were only respected for the talents they could project, claim or fabricate.
The people who can best project, claim and fabricate talents are of course salespeople.
Large UK companies are IMHO dominated by sales people types at high levels, which leads to a particular mode of destructive behaviour.
Of course all personality types are required in balance to allow a company to function optimally, both salespeople to provide the drive and ambition and technical to provide the realism.
Unfortunately most UK companies seem to have forgotten this.
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105 arm n leg times
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
Philip K. Dick
One of my favourite authors, wrote the stories that Total Recall, Minority Report and Bladerunner are based on. Died far too young.
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Re 112
I liked that one as well.
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armagediontimes (#85) "If a great number of people write in to say that they think you are a great educator, then I will of course review my position. Somehow I think I'm on solid ground"
armagediontimes (#109) "So; In answer to your question: No it is not rational to draw any of the conclusions that you do."
You are irrational and demonstrably do not understand the logic of what you and I post, hence you are incorrigible/ineducable.
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One thing important to point out is that everything is about expectations. In a system of understanding where 'expectation' (a prediction accompanied by a sense of likelihood) is fundamental, then it is not even necessary to explain what money 'is'. Everything becomes a matter of expectation. Another thing to point out is that, despite some opinions here, cognitive ability is not particularly important. I present the humble earthworm as evidence of that.
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glanafon (#110) "I found it curious that you repeatedly refer to this ETS outfit and then claim they have got something wrong because it does nay fit with your outlook."
Because you don't undertand what you read, nor do you take advice.
If you'd followed what ETS said in their video and report, and if you'd read and understood what I'd posted, you would have grasped the significance of my remarks on the absence of their promised White Paper and 'solutions'.
You haven't, which is why, under the circumstances, I think it fair and just to describe your posts as ignorant and impudent.
This is, I remind you, an extremely important matter, for many people's lives.
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The rhetorical use of obscurity is a vice. It is often said that the purpose of obscure or difficult writing is to create the illusion of profundity. In its more subtle usages, obscurity can be used to create the illusion of a deeply reasoned argument. But suppose there is no argument; suppose that the text is assertive in manner, perhaps because analytical reasoning has been repudiated in favour of reasoning of some higher kind. If now the text is made hard to follow because of non sequiturs, digressions, paradoxes, impressive sounding references, 'in' jokes,trollopy metaphores, and a general determination to keep all vulgar sensibilities at bay, then we shall have great difficulty in finding out what the author intends.
In all territories of thought which science or philosophy can lay claim to, no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.
Now who on this board might this refer to, I wonder? Not that they will recognise it themselves, of course.
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glanafon - I see that we have both been nominated for the 'ignorant and impudent' club by the Great Educator. I don't know about you, but I regard it as a badge of honour. Perhaps we should design a tie?
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FrankSz (#115) "One thing important to point out is that everything is about expectations."
This is false.
"In a system of understanding where 'expectation' (a prediction accompanied by a sense of likelihood) is fundamental, then it is not even necessary to explain what money 'is'. Everything becomes a matter of expectation."
This is not true. Many have, since the 60s been subverted to think it true, but it is not. We can, and we do, program computers and robots to do most of the work which humans can do. This is the power of 'effectivity'. Expectations do not come into this. People like Bruner grossly misled/subverted a generation and we still have not recovered. If we do not, it will be our demise.
Automata are slowly replacing humans because a) human cognitive behaviour is diverse/unreliable and b) where it is reliable, it's expensive.
"Another thing to point out is that, despite some opinions here, cognitive ability is not particularly important. I present the humble earthworm as evidence of that."
The relationship between 'g', SES and GDP clearly is important empirically. Try finding a doctor, dentist, engineer with a low IQ (they'll also be makng much use of automation).
Anyone asserting otherwise is either ill-informed, obtuse, subversive or........... just winding people up ;-).
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probablynogod (#117) "Now who on this board might this refer to, I wonder? Not that they will recognise it themselves, of course."
is it you?
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Look, Ms Flanders, the GDP framework cannot tell us whether final goods and services that were produced during a particular period of time represents a reflection of wealth expansion, or a reflection of capital consumption.
For instance, if a government embarks on the building of a couple of pyramids, which adds absolutely nothing to the well-being of individuals, the GDP framework will regard this as economic growth. In reality, however, the building of the pyramids will divert real funding from wealth-generating activities, thereby stifling the production of wealth.
Because the GDP framework completely disregards the intermediate stages of production, it can be of little help in the assessment of boom-bust cycles. It is little wonder then that mainstream economists are forced to conclude that recessions are a response to a sudden fall in consumer spending. Therefore, it is quite logical within the GDP framework to advocate loose monetary policies to revive the "economy."
The whole idea of GDP gives the impression that there is such a thing as the national output. In the real world, however, wealth is produced by someone and belongs to somebody. In other words, goods and services are not produced in totality and supervised by one supreme leader. This, in turn, means that the entire concept of GDP is devoid of any basis in reality. It is an empty concept.
"The attempt to determine in money the wealth of a nation or the whole mankind are as childish as the mystic efforts to solve the riddles of the universe by worrying about the dimension of the pyramid of Cheops."
--Ludwig von Mises
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118 probablynogod
''Perhaps we should design a tie?''
I've got good one somewhere, a bow tie that lights up and spins. Breaks the ice at parties. You'd be surprise how many women come up and talk to you.
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116 JadedJean
''This is, I remind you, an extremely important matter, for many people's lives.''
What worries me is how important it would be for the group you regard as having undesirble characteristics, which look to be the majority of humankind. You state your objective is to educate which could mean almost anything but when you start posting links to newspaper reports about the KKK and others (such as the chinese intervention stopping reproduction by certain categories of the public) and complain of Liberal Democracy PC problems it suggests a politicl agenda also. That is why I cannot take anything you say seriously.
As I see it you are complaining that bright people are not reproducing enough for your liking. There are all sorts of things that can be done to remedy this without intervention on others. You could for example bar them (above average IQ people) from having jobs so they are poorer, because I believe somewhere in the never ending stream of links and statements there was a correlation between affluence and reproduction rates. There you are - wallah. And high IQ people are only a minority so the majority are unaffected. It doesn't sound any more wacky than some of the stuff you imply.
You effectively have complained that low IQ people are a threat to society. I have previously asked you about the above average IQ man who has an accident and his IQ drops to a lower level. Is this man more or less of a threat to society due to his accident. In what way do you feel you should have dominion on this man. Bearing in mind that this man could always be you, because an accident can happen to anybody.
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#120 JadedJean:"probablynogod (#117) "Now who on this board might this refer to, I wonder? Not that they will recognise it themselves, of course."
is it you?"
Could be, but I think there's a better candidate.
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#122 glanafon: ''Perhaps we should design a tie?''
"I've got good one somewhere, a bow tie that lights up and spins. Breaks the ice at parties. You'd be surprise how many women come up and talk to you."
Just so long as they don't think that postmodernist psychobabble is an indication of intelligence!
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Reminds me of a camel ride I had at Giza.
I reckon the camel controller (or whatever the technical term is) might argue the presence of the pyramid is increasing his quality of life.
The camel would probably argue differently.
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119 jj
''Automata are slowly replacing humans because a) human cognitive behaviour is diverse/unreliable and b) where it is reliable, it's expensive.''
In the 60s Work was done using pigeons to quality control pills, medicine. The pigeons were in cages and pecked a lever when a poor quality pill came along. The pigeons were better at the job than humans and cheaper. The work was abandoned because the customer was judged to be put off by taking medication quality controlled by pigeons. The issue is more multidimensional than intelligence and reliability. Automated systems have their place but they, despite efforts, remain inflexible. Cost is the main driver not reliability. You also do not understand the desire to have individuality. The more standard all output becomes the greater the desire to have something none standard.
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125 probablynogod
re babble
No the trick is to listen, or appear to be listening.
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PS to my post 127
re Pigeons. Around about the same time experimantal work was done training chimps as workers. Work ws abandoned because due to animal welfare legistlation the cost of keeping a chimp, food housing handlers was higher than using a human. Cost is the driver.
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127
Do you think the government would have tried to tax the pidgeons on their take home seed ?
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tufftimes # 126
Re: Government pyramids. Let me gently remind you of the often-repeated but often-forgotten point: THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT HAVE ANY MONEY! It only has what it takes from the rest of us. Therefore, in order to provide for the well-being of the camel concessionaire - if indeed the government would allow such an enterprise - the rest of us will be that much worse off for it.
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BUSTED
glanafon (#127) "You also do not understand the desire to have individuality."
Which is further evidence that you've grasped next to nothing about the extent to which individualism/narcissism/ASPD has been selected/reinforced in furtherance of economic anarchism in Liberal-Democracies.
PS. A Tribute to the Harvard Pigeon Lab (19481998)
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An aside on the property market/boom/bust.
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This is hilarious. Labour are so desperate to squirm their way out of trouble that they don't even know what they are saying. It reminds me of the time that I got suspended from school not for actually hitting the other kid, but for the ludicrous way I tried to lie my way out of it... The difference is that I was 9. Gordon is 58. Bring out the Tories - at least then we will have a boom first and a jolly good punch up afterwards.
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Re 131
Doesn't that depend on how you define "us" ?
For example, the government taxes us to build the pyramid. The pyramid brings in tourists which bring in revenue from outside the local monetary system (a massive amount of Eygptian GDP is dependendent on tourism) which otherwise the government wouldn't get.
Anyway, I'm getting away from my original point, which was that you need to come up with something a lot more useless than a pyramid in order for your statement to work well. Pyramids have significant value - just ask the Egyptian government.
Is it possible to construct anything that is wholly useless ?
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134
Or maybe Prescott ? He's got a useful hook.
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One problem I see with version 2 is that it shows the UK already in a boom in 2001, when there was a global downturn and most developed economies were in recession. It just missed qualifying as a global recession according to the IMF, but it was along way from a boom.
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tufftimes # 135
Okay, in order to rebut your point, let us assume, for arguments sake, that the government stopped interfering in the "economy" and did not expropriate (divert) wealth from individuals to build the pyramids, then the wealth-generating activities of the free market (i.e. us) would provide another line of work or quality of life for the would-be camel concessionaire. Therefore, what would be the point in the government building the pyramids or whatever in the first place? It makes absolutely no sense at all.
Also, why would you want to enrich the government to the detriment of yourself? What makes you think the government can spend YOUR money much more efficiently than you can?
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These two graphs make very little sense to me. No one can know the true potential economic growth rate each year so you could draw whatever you like.
#63 "Surely the reality is that the credit crunch was caused by rapid expansion of the secondary, offshore, banking system due to imprudent and unregulated lending. At it's height this created as much credit in the world economy as the primary system and when, inevitably, the bubble burst its impact on the primary banking system was catastrophic."
And why were the banks (offshore or not) indulging in imprudent lending? Believe it or not, bankers are rational creatures. Imprudent lending is due to:
- central banks giving vast amounts of "free" money to banks (in the foolish hope that this will sustain a high level of economic growth, driven purely by the money supply)
- no expected penalty for failure, banks being "too big to fail". This was confirmed with the bailouts.
As a confirmation of this you can see that all the failing banks were in the US and Europe - and not in Asia or elsewhere where bank rules are just as loose. Now everyone is calling for strict banking regulation, but this is nonsense. The real problem lies with the government, not with the banks.
And what are governments doing to fix the problem? Praising Keynes, handing out even more money to banks, increasing taxes and urging people to spend more. Good luck.
#65 and #121 - totally agree.
On the question of pyramids, you'd have to compare the extra business you get from tourism every year, to the extra business you would have obtained by simply cutting taxes.
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MUSICAL PETARDS
the_judge_of_it (#139) "And why were the banks (offshore or not) indulging in imprudent lending?"
But suely, ...we are led to believe that the reason they did so was because they believed their risks were covered by securitization/CDOs/CSDs - i.e they were insured? We are also led to believe that this pleased a) 'socialists' and b) 'capitalists' alike as it meant a) fairer distribution of 'wealth/asssets' and b) great profits for those who were in the loop. Hence lots of immigration/differential fertility and many eyes off regulation/reality....
Or is everyone now bored with that explanation, and now there's a new idea we're all supposed to leap upon?
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JadedJean:
"
The relationship between 'g', SES and GDP clearly is important empirically. Try finding a doctor, dentist, engineer with a low IQ (they'll also be makng much use of automation).
"
The earthworm, incidentally, can also be used as evidence to show the unimportance of GDP.
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Surely it is human nature not to recognise the good times when you are living them.
It is only when the good times stop that you realise how good they were.
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I DON'T BELIEEEEEEEEEEEVE IT!
Whilst we're talking about things which are not 'important' or relevant or rational, can someone please explain to me why Carol Vorderman who apparently got a third class honours degree in engineering and whose claim to fame is a) doing Primary School arithmetic sums very quickly for Countdown b) being quite cute/nice and c) featuring in exercise/detox DVDs etc, is serving as an 'expert' on a maths teaching 'task force' for the Conservatives?
No wonder Chris Woodhead is thinking of throwing himself off a cliff! If this isn't evidence of dysgenesis and subversion, what will it take to wake people up? ken Livingstone was on the AM Show saying when he was at school, maths was taught in a 'boring' way. So, low ability in maths (a good proxy for 'g' IQ) is down to 'bad teaching'???
PS. The old truths/stereotypes have a firm basis in reality.
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52. At 5:19pm on 01 May 2009, strategycall
Thanks for making me laugh. A good sense of humour is priceless.
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143 jj
Well that narrows it down a bit, your obviously not Carol V. ; )
As the schooling is so, well below what I think is up to scratch, I don't think it matters who advises what, the same teachers remain in place. The few exceptional teachers, are that, exceptional. And getting rid of a bad teacher appears difficult. BTW Isnt this Chris Woodenhead the one who had a relationship with a schoolgirl and thinks such relationships are okay.
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THE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM WAS AN DREAM STOKED UP BY BIG TIME PUBLIC
SPENDING ..... DA DA DA! JUST LIKE A CATHERINE WHEEL UNTIL IT RUNS OUT OF
FIZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
A SIMPLE PONZI TRICK BY A CON ARTIST WHO HAS NOW BEEN FOUND OUT!!
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jj
PS re 143
Carol V has an IQ of 154 evidently and is a member of Mensa. It seems you are unhappy with even high IQ people. JJ is there anybody you are happy with that is alive. I do agree the 3rd is a bit odd but perhaps a high IQ isn't all its cracked up to be. I thought a high IQ was meant to be a good indicator of future achievement, wasn't that one of the things you advised. : ) Oh dear Oh dear.
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#114 Jadedjean. It is pleasing to note that you exhibit frustration with my obtuse argumentative style. Perhaps this may give you pause to consider the old adage "The last thing we know is the effect we have on others."
#143 Also (from my egotistical/narcissistic perspective) pleasing to note that you consider maths a good proxy for IQ. Perhaps you should read my written word more carefully, as according to you I am likely to have a very high IQ, and you appear to regard this as universally beneficial.
I recall local TV stations in Texas endlessly ramping Enron - something about however high the share price went they were always undervalued because the aggregate intellect of the employees was so great that the company had an unmatchable competitive advantage. Unmatchable because all the smartest people wanted to work for them, and so they would always have first pick of the global talent pool.
Do you know what happened to Enron? Do you know what happened to all the investors who believed this argument?
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#143 JJ - interesting that you place more weight on CV's third class degree than you do on her IQ of 154, given your faith in the validity of that measure of intelligence in other areas! I have not much time for Cameron, and even less for his Party, but perhaps he is right to tap into the knowledge and experience of a woman who actually did Maths at A level, and then did a mathematically based degree at what is generally regarded as the best UK university*, rather than listen only to EdPsychs and others whose mathematical base is comparatively flimsy? (*I say that as someone who worked at one of its competitors for that title, btw).
It doesn't seem that you know much about Cambridge either. There are any number of reasons for people there to get a third, and you only have to look at the woman to detect one of them. Some of the brightest people (and you have to be quite bright to get into the place at all) spend their time in ways that seem to them to be more valuable, but not necessarily best designed to get a First.
Given what you have implied previously about your involvement in teaching students, and your interest (maybe even professional) in educational psychology I find your lack of understanding in this area rather surprising.
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146 AC
Do you have any idea what Blears meant when she said about Brown and co, 'we have to be more human'. It all sounded very David Icke to me.
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glanafon (#145) "As the schooling is so, well below what I think is up to scratch, I don't think it matters who advises what, the same teachers remain in place."
Schools and teachers are of course not perfect, nothing ever is, but the point (as ever) being made here is that ability is largely genetic not inculcated. One can put as many specialist maths teachers in schools as one likes, one won't make maths any easier. There are plenty of good Oxbridge teachers in our Inner City schools who have learned this the hard way over many years. These Lysenkoist polices will just punish more of them and raise false hopes. It has already irreesponsibly licenced mass low-skilled immigration and differential fertility.
What you may not have grasped is that the point being made is simple, but at the same time, for many, it's extremely radical given recent folk psychology. Some of the simplest truths are the hardest to grasp and to hold on to.
What you say about Chris Woodhead was quite controversial at the time (1999) and referred back to events in the 1970s (no doubt because of other unpopular lines he was taking in the 1990s) I'm not condoning or criticisng his 1970s behaviour. However, there's still a lot of muddled talk in education (and other areas of 'behaviour management' policy) these days, and you'll just have to look at the links I've provided and decide what to make of it all I guess.
It's still worth browsing his 'Class Wars' as well as digging out some of his other writings on what New Labour did to standards. The question one has to ask is whether the expansion of education since the 70s has just been a cynical, venal, pandering to aspirational narcissism in pursuit of more loans and profits.
I suggest there is something important to be grasped from the case I have made. It goes way beyond personal vanities. If I am right, we have been doing great harm to this country and its people by being too liberal with 'equalitarian ideas' at the expense of hard evidence.
For something quite chilling, see if you can find a review of the film 'I, Psychopath' on the web. These people share half their statistical 'factor structure' with clinical narcissists (both personlity Disorders are on Axis II of DSM-IV, in Cluster B), and no, this is not a personal slight - it's just a benevolent 'heads-up' to something alarming.
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#143 JJ
Just taken time out from my OU assignment crisis (more maths) to look in.
I'm afraid I do believe it. The allure of the anima architype is eternal - even if, in CV's case, it is probably reinforced with polyfilla. I've always found that Jungian psychology offers at at least as good a tool for understanding society as does behaviourism.
For example, I've always thought of the celibate priestly hierarchy as making the bargain of the Rhinegold: to forgo love in return for power. In the end this is a futile and literally a sterile bargain.
Emotionally charged images and myths have an enormous power for good and for ill in society. The problem with an overly "scientific" approach, is the question: What's the bloody point of it all? I don't normally look around the pub or street and think "My - I'd like to improve HER gene pool!" Perhaps I should? ;-)
One of my favourite books is "The Ghost in the Machine" by Arthur Koestler. It's a very amusing critique - or perhaps assassination - of behaviourism. The best chapter title is "The Poverty Of Ratomorphism", where he attacks extrapolation from animals to humans.
I discovered recently that a favourite ex-student of mine had made enough money in "the oldest profession" to buy a house. She has subsequently found a decent husband too. She did not do well at school, or in SATS, because she didn't care. But I always thought she was intelligent because of her sense of humour and contrariness. I must have done something right though because she asked me whether I would give lessons to her son in a couple of years' time.
The danger is that eugenics would impoverish society, because it would tend to select for conformism. If we wish to improve things, worry less about artificial measures of intelligence, but more about the international media empires whose aim seems to be to subvert our democratic processes by promoting ignorance and IDIOCRACY as virtues. I cannot name names, because the tentacles of this evil empire have ensnared both major political parties, and governments around the world.
Ah well, back to Fourier Transform theory now. :-(
Mr Rupert Murdoch is 78.
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150 glanafon
She just ENDORSED the fact they have TOTALLY lost IT!!
Its past my bed time in Moscow & it's very LATE.
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151 jj
I know for a fact that a good teacher can make maths easier than a bad teacher. It called communication. Maths is just a language, it might be an operative language, but it is just a language. Like all languages it can be taught. Set theory used to be considered only suitable for final year maths undergraduates. It is now early A level.
Teachers that sexually predate on vulnerable students in their care are not acceptable, and appear to not be that rare. The usual claim is they are in contact with a independent young adult. However when a repeat pattern is identifable it is not casual.
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#152 JJ Schools and teachers are of course not perfect, nothing ever is, but the point (as ever) being made here is that ability is largely genetic not inculcated.
This might be so, but in my considerable experience, measures of abilty used in schools often miss clever students from poor backgrounds, and many students who don't perform for a variety of reasons.
I myself was told that I shouldn't be entered for maths "O" level because I wasn't good enough. I proved the B***s wrong. (My original degree was in chemistry and maths, but I now I also have a first class honours M.Math) However, in life I have seen too many fail, and thought "there but for the grace of God..." I went into teaching because I was determined NOT to write other people off as I was written off.
Sadly, I'm afraid that the education system is still based on rewarding conformity rather than encouraging people to apply their knowledge and think for themselves. As for genes versus nurture: the dice MAY be loaded somewhat, but intelligence is very much a random variable. Give people a chance to prove themselves!
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155 sasha
What a great post.
I often see the education system as a forced march with those who cannot keep the up with the pace dumped. There are many reasons why the pace cannot be maintained, including breaks due to illness, circumstances, but there is no recovery position. Therefore potential is wasted. Once dislocated from the process a stalling occurs and with time the slippage becomes unrecoverable.
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148 armagediontimes
Oh dear oh dear oh dear, you can do maths, have you ever used the Low Cunning technique. And now I am afraid you might well be a sort of banker in your interesting past. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. All illusions shattered : )
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#156 glanafon :-)
"Once dislocated from the process a stalling occurs and with time the slippage becomes unrecoverable. More difficult, but not impossible. I have seen many people go back to education in maturity, and find some fulfillment.
To be fair, I only succeeded because my parents (and Neil Small my physics teacher) encouraged me. Thank you Neil wherever you are. We stand upon the shoulders of those who helped us.
Before I retired, (I retired early from school due to ulcerative colitis, though I still help the kids of family and friends) I used to have a poster up on my classroom wall, a quote from Ecclesiastes: "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, ....but time and chance happeneth to them all."
To feed a child's dreams - read them Kipling's Elephant's Child. The benefits of insatiable curiosity by The great grey-green greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees.""Why?" - the most important word in the English language.
Education may or may not help people get a better job, but it will enrich their lives. It is certainly one of the main things which makes mine worth living.
Night all! :-)
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Richardtete aka JJ is a success. He must be because this blog has once again gone off topic to discuss the oupourings of his febrile imagination. The majority of us know that he is deluded. By now he must aslo be aware that, should he and his type ever make a bid for power, then they would be most seriously opposed and defeated.
Now can we gt back to the question originally posed? In my opinion, and that's all it is an opinion, the first graph is really a very good piece of academic manipulation. It merely repesents the ability to 'prove' items by numbers whilst avoiding the facts that underpin them.
The second graph is only slightly less misleading. It is still based upon the cocnept of growth. However, there is still no true agreement as to what we mean by this term. Are we talking about the introduction of new productive factors into an economy or are we looking merely at an increased monetry value (GDP)? Until we all understand what we are really talking about then we are just playing with numbers.
Secondly, when looking at the UK in particular, we must also take into account the concept of balance (not equilibrum in the Classical sense). The UK has had an unbalanced economy for many years. The relaince upon the provision of financial services has robbed us of the means to maximise our potential in manufacturing, farming etc. etc. Therefore when a major downturn effects the world market we have little or no residual strength to sustain us. The mirror image of the uk is shown in the German situation.
The credit boom in the consumer segment has been created by the overblown financial sector. As with the US we are now finding that we actually didn't need all of these 'goodies' that we have been paying over the top for for years! Don't believe me, then tell me why cars are still more expensive in the UK than in other EU countries? Tell me why when China has been pumping-out cheap goods have prices not dropped equivalently in UK shops? Why did house prices rise as they did unless the financial services companies fueled the boom - if we needed so many new houses as a nation why did we keep building so many large detatched houses? Why were other options than home ownership not developed?
Therefore before we start looking at a national picture for answers we must look at how all of the parts fit together before we make decisions on the sum of the parts. We then need to be less sophisticated with our manipulation of the data so that we can developed a clearer (true?) understanding of what we are really talking about.
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probablynogod (#149) Here's how it used to work.
Somneone would do a first degree, get a decent one (first orf IIi) and go on to do post-graduate research in their subject. In the sciences this would be a PhD, during which time they would do really quite mundane lab work which taught them their basic trade. It was not a creative process, just a disciplined one. They would then do several post-doc periods amounting to years of research in other researchers' labs improving their expertise. Ultimately, after many years of hard work, with lots of peer reviewed publications in their field usually, they might get to be a professor. After several more years, with lots of experience running a department, as an external examiner, and with senior membership of their natinal/international proferssional body, they might be asked to advice a government department on policy.
See how things have changed? Perhaps not.
See anarchism/subversion.
PS. Please note: Galton, Pearson, Spearman, Fisher etc knew a thing or two about human diversity/biometrics. Today, 80% of psychologists are female.
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glanafon (#154) "I know for a fact that a good teacher can make maths easier than a bad teacher. It called communication. Maths is just a language, it might be an operative language, but it is just a language. Like all languages it can be taught. Set theory used to be considered only suitable for final year maths undergraduates. It is now early A level."
People have innate aptitudes just as they have genetic risks for diseases. Ability is also Gausssian (randomly) distributed but tat doe snot mean it is not inherited. Until and unless people learn to talk/write (albeit tacitly) in statistical terms they will persist in talking indeterminate/inscrutible twaddle. All measurement has error terms, but what matters are repeated measures over tinme, not the odd IQ test or exam. People have good and bad days. What matters is consistency. School tends to be a good way of highlighting consistent ability.
"Teachers that sexually predate on vulnerable students in their care are not acceptable"
Of course. But relationships between consenting adults, when professional relationships no longer exist, are legal and must be respected as such.
sashaclarkson (#155) "This might be so, but in my considerable experience, measures of abilty used in schools often miss clever students from poor backgrounds, and many students who don't perform for a variety of reasons."
What matters is statistical evidence, not personal experience (cf. actuarial vs clinical judgement research). As pointed out to glanafon and others, there are error terms. What I'm tacitly referring to is regular population measures of annual cohorts (of about 560,000, albeit covering few of the Indepdendent Schools) at 7, 11, 14 and 15 - repeated for 10 years!
"I myself was told that I shouldn't be entered for maths "O" level because I wasn't good enough. I proved the B***s wrong. (My original degree was in chemistry and maths, but I now I also have a first class honours M.Math) However, in life I have seen too many fail, and thought "there but for the grace of God..." I went into teaching because I was determined NOT to write other people off as I was written off."
Children mature at different rates. This is at least one point which is finally being appropriately recognised in the new approach to Key Stage 3 and beyond.
"Sadly, I'm afraid that the education system is still based on rewarding conformity rather than encouraging people to apply their knowledge and think for themselves."
Education is a matter of conformity. Think of maths and engineering. It is a matter of learning effectve (computational) processes. This is one point I keep making. It is all a matter of conformity. One sees this most clearly in science education where even at post-doc level the work is effectively factory work (99% perspiration).
"As for genes versus nurture: the dice MAY be loaded somewhat, but intelligence is very much a random variable. Give people a chance to prove themselves!"
False, the estimate is 80% heritability, most of the rest is down to damage post-conception. Please take this on board. It is at what's with popular opinion 180 degrees. Look into the research, you'll see what I am saying is true.
The relevance of some of this to 'the two graphs' is that all too much is produced these days in order to hoodwink/exploit an ever more vain/narcissistic public/consumer base. A lot of science has been commercialised too. See 'The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry' Select Committee report a few years ago to see how bad this has become. :-(
I repeat: we are in serious trouble. Hostile dissenters posting here are essentially part of the problem, as I hope I'm going some way towards highlighting.
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"After all, inflation wasn't showing any sign of an unsustainable boom, and that was all the Bank of England was supposed to be worried about"
An interesting statement !! So, in a very Nelson-ish manner, the BoE cannot "see" the inflation because their master and commander removed house prices from the CPI calculations and they did nothing about that !! Will Merv the Nerve will say, "Kiss me, Hardy !", before he goes ??
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#159 "Don't believe me, then tell me why cars are still more expensive in the UK than in other EU countries? Tell me why when China has been pumping-out cheap goods have prices not dropped equivalently in UK shops?"
Two interesting observations that can be explained by the same factor - greed !!
Car "costs", as opposed to prices, are the same throughout Europe !! However, local tax(es) play a big part in making the differences in various countries. Furthermore, local dealer(s)' profit margins also play a significant part in the final pricing. That is why, it is still cheaper to buy a popular brand car in parts of Belgium and bring it back than to buy the same car in Britain !! Low dealer's margins, low car tax and VAT on top of that make it a holiday in Belgium (wife and kiddies included) paid for by the difference in the prices !! A (then) high quid to Euro exchange rate also helped !!
Re. Chinese goods - a lighter leaves the factory gates in China for about 10 fen or 0.1 RMB or 1.25p !! By the time it arrives in the shops here, it costs from 50p to 1 quid !! Freight and admin costs *cannot* account for more than 1p !! Who made the difference in the price ?? T-shirts that leave the factory gates in China for about 50p are sold here for 5 quid or more !!
"Branding" has been a major "sinner" in these scenarios !! The difference in price between similar quality branded and unbranded products are very significant !!
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161 jj
Stats, statistics, are a tool, no more than that. If determined robustly they describe a general situation. Stats have errorbands and grey scale. You do not let the tool make the decision. Frequently the situation does not change the perspective does, nothing to do with stats - ''Children mature at different rates. This is at least one point which is finally being appropriately recognised''. The children have not changed, the question has.
Therefore the danger is black and white rules derivied from stats miss the target. There are concerns about stats not least of which is the person devising the question influences the answer. You yourself refer to the problem of science being a tool of commerce. I would add science being a tool of politics. It is scientists who have disembowelled their own credibility, not the public. It is sciencists that repeatedly claim they have the solution only to be found lacking, and frequently interventions make the mater worse. I have not seen much opinion anywhere that says everything is hunkydory so your comment ''we are in serious trouble'' is hardly alone.
Your opinion is from one point of view. You are just a voice in the crowd, as is anybody else posting. It is easier to undo something at the start than at the end. If you have worked in this area, education, you have failed dismally to communicate effectively what you see as a major problem, (if it is a problem), yet instead of accepting that outcome in that scenario - that you are very much part of the problem, you say everybody else is the problem.
Your continual use of what is apparently transference in this way is very much part of the problem with your message. Is the reason why you are so motivated on this issue due to your disquiet with your role. In your terms - I keep asking you to do your homework and you are still caught up in rhetoric. I suggest you look up 'empathy'.
A good Bank Holiday to all.
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There was a boom...but a boom in borrowing.
Most people didn't recognize how they were steadily becoming less able to buy into the 'lifestyle' that this society held up as being both desirable and necessary. They didn't recognize their situation because easy credit filled the gap between income and aspirations.
All that has happened is that reality has caught up with a large number of people and consequently a large chunk of (credit driven) spending power has been removed from the economy. Hence the rapid shrinkage.
One could argue about why people's real incomes declined and why credit took up the slack. What is the more telling discussion is why wasn't something done to address the problem by this (Labour) Government years ago. This situation was a regular topic of conversation at my local pub right back in 2005...when many people realized that despite regular pay increases over some years, most could no longer afford to buy the properties being advertised as 'ideal first time buys'
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#157 glanafon - In common with another well known poster, you are doing it wrong. I have never been a banker of any sort. My time in Houston was devoted to trying to engineer a transfer of money and technology to a South West African country who had previously been a recipient of a large scale transfer of landmines from the main western powers.
In Africa I saw no evidence of a local popular demand for the importation of more landmines, and I saw no evidence that local people perceived any benefit in the deaths and large scale loss of limbs that arose as a consequence of this form of western munificence.
For this, and other reasons, I reserve my rights to engage in any kind of argumentative technique that I feel appropriate - or would you rather I adopted more official policies? Do you, for example, think your neighborhood would benefit from a few carelessly placed land mines?
If the answer is no - then on what basis do you consider it appropriate that others should be the recipients of this form of technology? I do not know what your answer is, but I do hope that it has nothing to do with racially derived IQ differentials.
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glanafon (#164) "Stats, statistics, are a tool, no more than that. If determined robustly they describe a general situation. Stats have errorbands and grey scale. You do not let the tool make the decision."
We do! More and more so! It's what the references to actuarial vs clinical judgement and automation/extensionality, was about.
You are wrong.
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166 arm n leg times
Well thats a relief. I thought it was all going to descend into rocket science again.
Where have I ever suggested war or weapons of war are a good thing.
If you have tried to do something about a downside you are exceptional.
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Old: "Beware Greeks bearing gifts"
New: Beware Economists bearing graphs with miss-labelled or badly labelled axes
What the heck is Percentage of trend output ?
Well lets start by looking at output Why is output where it is ? in medieval times the amount of salt taken out of mine was limited by things lke how many shovels were available.
Nowadays though, if we had a salt mine, it would be ridiculous to talk about the productivity of a salt mine.
The quantity extracted is limited by the quantity requested by the customers. In modern mines, if an order for double came in then with no more workers (machine operators) twice teh salt could be extracted : just type 2 in the computer and press the button its daft to say that the productivity or the output is double now what it was before the only sensible thing to say is that they received double the orders.
My local pub has 10 staff working there. On Wednesday afternoon there are sometimes more staff than customers, on Friday evening the place can have several hundred people inside Has the output of the pub increased ? Has the productivity increased ? no, the only sensible thing to say is there are just more orders from customers.
Just how you measure output in services or productivity gains in services without mistaking it for just more orders is even more difficult. According to the BEA see [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]efficiency in finance is calculated on cheques and direct debits being processed/per something or other. Its a little like me saying that I am twice as efficient as you because my spreadsheet had 200 numbers to add up using auto sum and yours had only 100 its a joke !
Youll find orders go down when customers have less to spend The charts in the article have axes that say Percentage of trend output ? this a nonsense miss-label : what you are really looking at is a chart that says something like Disposable Income
Under the present financial system Money is the driver so More Money = More Orders = More Output. Economics is no longer about the allocation of scarce real resources with money as a mere trading convenience its about the allocation of the artificial scarcity of money. For a better way to do things use NEFS Net Export Financial Simulation : http://www.worldnews.blog-city.com
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So the tool is being used to make decisions but you are saying the wrong decisions are being made.
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# 155 & 158 SashaClarkson
Well said.
"Education .... is certainly one of the main things which makes 'my life' worth living."
And mine.
A shame that so many politicians make a mockery of the education they have received by resorting to spin, lack of responsibility, throwing wobbly statistics around and avoiding answering questions. And in my humble opinion refusing to face reality.
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I see the PRC has another brilliant policy. Get officals to smoke to boost the economy.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/China-Orders-Officials-In-Hubei-To-Smoke-45-Million-Cigarettes-A-Year-Or-Face-Fines/Article/200905115274519?f=rss
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glanafon (#170) "So the tool is being used to make decisions but you are saying the wrong decisions are being made."
Any technology can be abused. The science/technology has been abused both by HMG (in many areas) though poor respect for what is measured. In the Private Sector (as has been mentioned before) it's been used surreptiously to hide risk, but the logical and empirical justification of actuarial over clinical judgement is well established. Problems inevitably arise when managers and politicians hybridize the language of science with that of Natural Language. Those who refer to, or marginalise technical experts as 'back-office people', 'techies', 'boffins' etc, should, I suggest, be treated with extreme caution if not contempt as it's more and more the case that the technical peoples' skills which most of the developed world as we know it today depends upon. We are slowly losing them through dysgenesis and reinforcing/selecting other, less desirable/fit, behaviours.
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glanafon # 172
"I see the PRC has another brilliant policy. Get officals to smoke to boost the economy."
I wouldn't laugh too hard, the government will try something similar in this country before long. In fact, they have already moved in that direction by trying to entice people take on more debt and trade in their old "clunkers" for a shiny new car with a "sweetner" that essentially amounts to their own money that was stolen from them in the first place.
Like the Chinese being forced to smoke millions of cigarettes or face punishment, doesn't anyone see the utter absurdity of this government's policies. Absurdity/government; a perfect synonym!
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glanafon (#172) Contrasted with...
Now, are statist governments popular with the Liberal-Democratic media? If not, why not? How does the media go about reinforcing this? Is Mr Murdoch a statist? If not, why isn't he...?
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174 LibertKurt
I was not laughing I was appalled.
173 jj
As usual jj you have lost me. I say stats are a tool and you don't let the tool make the decision, you use it to aid decision making. I also point out that those that ask the questions influence the answers, ie the stats.
You protest. When I say you are saying the decisions are not correct, and the tools have given these decisions, your response is to say the science is abused. What is the difference. And in what way is the public meant to be able to determine what has been cooked or not, or what proposal will work, when clearly some proposals make matters worst, eg cane toads in Australia. That is why scientists have lost credibility which makes getting the right strategies through all the more difficult. The outcome is things have to get really bad before before it is accepted by the public something has to be done, this is not sound. Icarus comes to mind.
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#163
You are probably right when you say my questions can be answered with the word greed.
If you take that one step further then you have to ask who was being greedy? It is easy to say we all were. Many in the UK placed themselves in serious debt to continue to fund a lifestyle. However they were only allowed to do so by an even more greedy financial services sector who arranged more and more risky secured loans and mortgages PLUS unsecured loans and higher credit card limits. House prices did not rise so stupendously because there was a shortage (real or imagined) but because there was more and more money being made available.
The greed certainly centered upon the banks and other financial institutions. It infected not only the consumer markets but also retail and manufactuting (don't let's even mention working capital finance!). However where did all this 'greed' wealth go? What happened to the 'tickledown effect' so beloved of Thatcher? The costs of all of the risk taking only raised its head over the last 18 months but these boys have been at it for years!
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175 jj
Yes but the instruction to smoke, until informed otherwise, remains reality. You are too qick to ingnore what doesnt suit your arguement.
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glanafon?
I think you're correct,for what it's worth.
WHOOPS I BETTER WATCH OUT FOR MONO CURSE?
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177 foredeck
There is a pattern with most who are in debt. They are encouraged to take the debt by a salesman. They then find that things are tight because they haev adebt laod not present before. The solution is given by a phone call from the salesman again, who routinely follows up for more business, and who probably diarises that they are due to be getting in trouble.
The salesman offers to help, in fact when he rings it is to say 'is there anyway we can help you'. The debt is repackaged and extended. Things become further tighter, so around the loop again. The guys behind the salesman are not bothered because the property is seen as an asset, and the financial bill for the debt is probably higher than needed so there is fat in the system.
Now I appreciate that people, consumers, have to be accountable, but at the same time I fail to see why financial services should be allowed to work like this. It is no different than a loan shark or the candy man. The only time the guys behind the salesman worry is when the property nosedives, and at that point the taxpayer appears to be being asked to both carry the welfare bill for the freahly dispossessed and to feed money to the guys behind the salesman, the same salesman who was given a much higher commission for sales to people who were unsound, than the commision for sales to the sound consumer. Now isn't that strange.
The far east used to have a torture - ransom technique where the victim seized, and told a ransom was demanded and if it was not paid a body part would be removed. The victim was then approached and told by a stooge that the ransom was being arranged, but a ransom was never actually requested. The victim was told every time the ransom did not appear a piece would be removed from them, which did they nominate. So a limb was removed. The stooge would appear and say the ransom was still being arranged. The victim would nominate anothe body part for removal. And so it would go on until there was a just talking torso. Why should the financial version of this be allowed. It is not in the interest of the consumer, it is not in the interest of the taxpayer. It is not even in the interest of the loan provider in the long term. Sharp practice should be banned, and despite all the puff and huff it is easy to do at the point of sale.
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179 AC
I'm off for a beer and to put my head in a bucket of ice. Moi IQ can't take it.
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glanafon (#176) "As usual jj you have lost me."
Perhaps if you spent more tome on these you wouldn't not get lost so quickly? There are decades of work on the point I made about actuarial vs clinical judgement. When you go to your doctor (to take just one example) s/he looks at your biological responses (e.g. blood tests) relative to other people (a reference class) and makes an assessment based on normative data. However, medical science is also used to perfect weapons to kill people.
..That is why scientists have lost credibility which makes getting the right strategies through all the more difficult.
Lost credibility wit who? Our politicians have commercialised science and politicised the Civil Service. Before subversives/anarchists like Blair/Thatcher and their free-market friends came along subverting respect, deference, 'elitism' and 'the state' (and anyone who says they have not is either lying or just ignornant), people who didn't have a lot of education/ability tended to be far more respectful of those who did (for reasons which were even to them ****ing obvious!).
Now, hordes of people with precious little grasp of anything (they're even 'proud' to admit this), expect/demand years/decades of work be condensed into one minute summaries in ordinary English fit for the numeracy/literacy level of an ADHD kid.
Do you not see anything just a tiny bit odd/irrational/seditious about that?
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glanafon (#178) "Yes but the instruction to smoke, until informed otherwise, remains reality. You are too qick to ingnore what doesnt suit your arguement."
I'm too quick to ignore?
OK, do you believe the propaganda about Germans killing babies with bayonets in WWI and the stories about human soap and lampshades in WWII? How about WMDs in Iraq and the baby killing Iraqi troops in Kuwait? How evil as the 'evil empire' of the USSR? You do appreciate that the PRC is much more traditionally communist than the USSR was? Why is the Cold War over? The PRC has ~10x the population of Russia.
Or how about this today? Why is it OK for Japan to launch satellites but not N Korea or Iran?
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Is there the remotest chance of any 'economics' breaking out here?
For Example:
Consider the likelihood of Alistair Darling's Budget economics forecast coming true now that the EU have decided that the Euro zone outlook has dramatically worsened (from minus 2 percent to minus 4 percent) My guess, for what it is worth, is that the odds against it have significantly worsened since last week!
OR perhaps:
Now that Chrysler are predicting that spare parts will be in short supply within weeks - and where will Fiat get the money from anyway! What of GM too as it seems that the Chrysler bankruptcy is/may be a rehearsal for GM in June!
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ANARCHISM
John_from_Hendon (#184) "Is there the remotest chance of any 'economics' breaking out here?"
Isn't the general message one of that outside a Command Economy, where there's enforced regulation (however unpalatable), 'economics', as a science' (or technology), amenable to rational analysis and discussion, is essentially a myth? As we don't have a Command Economy in our Liberal-Democracies (and as we have been busy trying to sabotage them wherever we've seen them), who can rationally answer your questions?
Even your sensible solutions presume, it seems to me, a degree of legislative/executive control/enforcement which we have not seen for decades. I've been tying to highlight how in practice, i.e through their behaviour, many people have been unwittingly lulled into contributing towards pulling the rugs from under their own, and their progeny's, feet.
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183 and 182 jj
As usual you are moving to what you call nefarious rhetoric. You are also as usual moving to diversion. I have never say or inferred anything about wmd, satellites etc. I personally cannot see the arguement that it is okay for some countries to have a technology and not for others, as judged by the countries that hold the technology. It is also pretty obvious that the technology at a basic level is mature and therefore not containable.
With respect to doctors, the one thing I would say is they will in generally only prescribe what is listed on the NICE list. Their mode of operation is prescriptive, if you excuse the pun. When a doctor is faced with a patient with a health problem they are obliged to issue advice ie use the NICE list, to not do so leaves them open to complaint. The patient is advised they have the option of ignoring the NICE prescription. However when litigation, not necessarily with the doctor, is taking place on health issues if the litigant has not been compliant with NHS prescription advice, usually a patients right, this adversely and significantly affects outcomes, patient rights are negated. Tell me do you think the NHS NICE list is definative of all medical knowledge. Or that a doctor working within the constraints of NICE is the boundary of healthcare.
All you are doing is showing your limits and faith in professionals when at the same time you have complained so much that professionals - in your opinion - are failing to get the right policy implemented. You like to have it both ways but it doesnt wash.
It is clear that at least some of the public are questioning 'science' as presented by various pressure groups. There are two opposing views about the risk of climate change for example. Both cannot in the main be right. There is nothing wrong with science, what is wrong is that people do not know whether they are looking at science or abuse of science, which you have conceded exists. That has an impact on the public. It is not a positive one. It is the reason that the one sheet summary you object to is now asked for by some, so at least some statement is available to check what the expert is claiming as sound opinion. It is scientists who have created this situation not the public. As I have pointed out the loss of credibility is a danger - the danger is the Icarus syndrome. Take no heed until too late.
You are apparently bitter about the loss of status of highly educated professional people. This is nothing new, you are the one that swalloed the story that status would follow for a certain sort of behaviour. You are really no different than the people who bought shares on the forecast of growth. It was an illusion, a promise. You were not told there were snakes as well as ladders, and now you have stepped on a snake. The uncomfortable fact is that intelligence is no defence against conmen or adverse circumstance, and the future is always an extrapolation not an interpolation. Do you really think the Fleet St mechanical printers did not feel bitter when they were tossed to one side by digital technology, ie 'progress'. Or that engineers who have trained and worked in manufacturing are happy with their knowledge and experience being declared worthless by that sector being shipped abroad for social convenience.
As a country we have been in decline for decades, and decline means loss for many, there are few winners, particularly those who have made long term investments in specialist training. Training BTW is now generally very short term, ie lacking in depth, the idea is you continually retrain, ie have no depth of knowledge, now why could that be. It is because a depth of knowledge is not deemed necessary. Why is that, because the continuity of knowledge, the breadth and width needed has collapsed due to technical development stalling. you need a very significant sector activity in order to justify the cost of specialists.
You are basically an 'I' specialist, it is I, I, I. You do not appear to have looked up 'empathy' yet. You seem to think you are the only person facing problems. You keep sliding down the snake.
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John_from_Hendon # 184
If you want an honest opinion, I consider Darlings budget economic forecast as a deceitful farrago of half-baked neo-Keynesian fallacies and outright lies that attempts to paper over the governments bungling interventionism which has led us to where we all find ourselves now. How can anyone ever take seriously anything that spews forth out of the mouths of crooks, counterfeiters and fraudsters - irrespective of political allegiance - who claim to represent us?
As for GDP being a precise economic growth indicator see post # 121.
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glanafon (#186) I don't think you're quite grasping the freedom=anarchism=subversion point. In my book(s) (and lab experience), behaviour is controlled by its outcomes/consequences. Thoughts and 'explanations' don't come into it. People have to do as instructed/shaped in order to find out what heppens i.e the consequences.
I suggest you let that point settle.
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IS GORDY REALLY FAGAN?
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#184
John, I tried honest!!!
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foredeckdave (#190)
"John, I tried honest!!!"
Don't use words you don't understand.
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184 john from
Yes economics would be nice.
The EU forecast is not a surprise is it surely. The question is - is this to be the latest forecast to be superceded shortly by a worst forecast. I do not think they have a clue. The feedback loop is slower than events. Garbage in - garbage out. I was caught up in a revolution once, in a hotel about 3 or 4 miles from the frontline. The fighters came in on bombing runs. Casualties were reported as minimal because they bunkered down deep underground in ancient medieveil cellars. All you could do was go up on the roof and have a beer and watch. If you went out you were told get off the street you will be shot as a looter. It was remarkably real but still like a film scene, clear sky with a sunset. So I would suggest a beer.
There are two likely outcomes I am afraid. Generally being poorer. Public sector cuts big time, ie more job losses. Welcome to economic origami. You have the spreadsheet, dial it in. But you know the answer anyway. Even if you don't have much of a model what are the odds your answer is worse than somebody with an enormously complicated model and a Cray supercomputer.
Car spares, what do you expect. Bust companies don't make parts. There will still be loads of spares in the system. We are a long way from Mad Max. Anyway there are plenty of unsold cars. Plenty of people who will swop engines. Old tricks. But the public are naive in thinking there is some never ending supply of anything they want.
It is interesting to consider what is the best position to be in. With assets and savings or without. If you aint got nuthin you got nuthin to lose. The system will place most of the cost on a minority and steadily remove wealth from those with wealth. I think worrying about interest rates is the least of it.
I see the uplift point has moved out again, mid 2010 now. As I have commented before if you were running a critical path analysis on a project and had this sort of slippage (100 percent) you would say it was out of control and management was not possible. However as I have also said before it remains a minority unemployment problem, not if you are touched by it of course. I think values will reset to a different level. I also suspect HMG is getting info not yet in the public domain which is why gloom is about in the Westminster village. It reminds me of Thatchers demise. NuLab appears to be building up to the point of imploding slowly. Could be wrong. Meanwhile most people are still spending, more carefully thats all.
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189 AC
You sound bemused and fatigued, not like you at all.
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187 Lib Kurt
I do wish you wouldnt pussyfoot about. Just tell it as it is. : )
Trouble is actions have bee taken and the dominos set up. Brown thought he was in control and all it was was coincidence. What I do not understand is the deflationary impact of far eastern goods. It never seems to be raised. Prices on many goods have steadily fallen for years. Where has the inflation been. It just points to more hidden imbalances. If deflationary prices on some goods were present then inflationary pressure had to be higher elsewhere. Quite appart from the housing issue.
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WHO KEPT SAYING "IS HE ONE OF US?"
glanafon (#192) "Yes economics would be nice."
Then perhaps you'd better a) start listening instead of arguing, and b) vote in a government which will establish a planned/command economy so there are some rules and laws of practice, as the 'economists' of that sort were turfed out of their jobs long ago in favour of free-market neoconservative 'libertarians'. The same happened to many others who didn't preach the anarchistic line of inconsequential human diversity i.e. equalitarianism.
If you don't believe that possibly true, fair enough, but at least look into it, and question the representativeness of the statistics, given a population base rate ~2%). What are the odds?
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glanafon 193
Tired yes.Out in Russia been here a while doing a deal.EXHAUSTING!!
WATCHING GORDY ETC FROM A DISTANCE IS EVEN MORE EXHAUSTING.
AT LEAST WE ARE IN THE END GAME AT LAST. BUT WE ALL HAVE THE BILL TO PAY!
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glanafon # 194
How can I put this?
How can I put this?
RISING PRICES IS NOT INFLATION ANY MORE THAN FALLING PRICES IS DEFLATION! A rising price is symptomatic of inflation; it is NOT the cause.
Inflation is an expansion in the supply of money and credit. Deflation is a contraction of the supply of money and credit. Inflation does not necessarily mean that all prices for consumer and capital goods will have to rise together. Similarly, deflation does not necessarily mean that all prices for consumer and capital goods will have to fall together.
Inflation can be present in an economic system with maybe only one or perhaps two symptoms of it being observable. What do you think was the most glaring example of this symptom, which has resulted in this recession/depression/downturn/banana?
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Good, I read that some do remember that this is an economics blog! I like to feel the economic breeze as it moves the straws in the wind; to rip the chicken apart and attempt economic deviation through a thorough examinations of its entrails.
JadedJean as GBS wrote (Man and Superman Act II I think) 'you talk so well'! (You will know the context I am sure, or should that be Shaw.) But does your doubtlessly well thought out and illuminating contributions add to the general understanding of our economic situation (JJ this is a rhetorical question!)
I am genuinely interested in the value which we (society) put upon economic forecasts, and not solely the actual economic outcomes! For it has been my observation that we tend to act like the market and buy on the expectation (forecast, in this case be it good or bad) and then sell on the fact (economic outcome).
Glanafon: my view is I think similar to yours with regard to the EU prognostications in that they tend to reinforce a worse case scenario for the UK.
JadedJean can you justify your assertion that economic outcomes are the result of sociological imperatives rather than the baser market imperatives? Can you show how the dialectic of the sociological interactions between individuals governs economic outcomes more than the dialectic of the market and the imperatives of the material World? (I am not looking fro the complete text of Marx's Critique of Hegel here as I am in fact curious about how, and by how far, the World has or indeed has not changed in the last century or so since Marx's analysis.)
I do feel when I read some of the contributions that fill these 'economics' blogs that we a rehearsing the disagreements of the various Internationals and surrounding events. I just wonder if we could not be better employed applying ourselves to the here and now!
Let us face the facts that those in (perhaps nominal) economic control of the levers of economic management were (ill) educated into (a post) Thatcherite monetarist 'Boys from Chicago' can do no evil /zero Regulation philosophy. This is the factual situation, as I see it, on both sides of the Atlantic. Thee are stirrings of the left, as seen Today in the rise of the Communist Party of Japan and indeed quite a traditional left from what translated works I have read (are there any Japanese contributors who can enlighten us?) (I understand the the Japanese version of our Morning Star sells a million copies!)
But nevertheless we are generally stuck with the twits that we have for a long time to come - aren't we? So should we not strive to understand what makes them tick (and how to get them sacked!) These men are not un-intelligent, just going the wrong way, and is it not part of our 'job' to remonstrate with them and show them the error of their ways! Or is our contribution just to waffle-on and provide them with a fig leaf of (ineffectual) open 'free' discussion of alternatives.
alexandercurzon: IS GORDY REALLY FAGIN? No, I think he has Wilkins Micawber's (d)illusions! I don't think that he has the self awareness of Fagin.
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197 Lib Kurt
Yes.
But when imports from the far east turn up at a fraction of the cost of UK made stuff and contimue to fall it gives a false sense of wealth and increases the effectiveness of disposable income. As the RPI and CPI are monitored as measurands how is it different to monitor far eastern imports.
Also being a bit thick I cannot understand how you can pipe massive volumes of borrowed foreign funds into the UK and not notice it
198 John from
Economic forecasts
I suspect that the value put on economic forecasts is how much they coincide with what somebody wants to here.
195 jj
Is the your opening line another on of your riddle - me - this - riddle - me - that lines from the Riddler in the Batman series. Can I point out that the last time a single person could claim to know all of the knowledge in the world was at the start of the Italian Renaissance. That applies to you too.
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John_from_Hendon (#198) I am getting a bit weary of saying this, so I'll say it briefly and answer your post in more detail tomorrow (perhaps):
1) If one removes laws/regulations which manage 'economic' behaviour one promotes 'economic' anarchism. One will not be able to accurately predict, forecast or effectively manage an economy under such conditions. This essentially describes our failed free-market system.
2) I am puzzled as to why you persist in aksing questions as if this were not our curren predicament.
3) Sociology has nothing to do with this. Demographics and behavioural genetics which is lawful and descriptive, does. We have been breeding (and importing) more and more low-skilled people. What are they going to do?
For all your sensible solutions, you do not appear to have noticed that in order to implement and enforce any of them would require a strong state, effectively, a Command Economy. But we have been induced by free-market libertarians to take those apart both domestically, and abroad, as 'evil' and oppressive' for years, have we not?
I had thought that I had been making a rather radical point, and consistently so. It may still be alien/inconceivable to many, but does that that make it any less practical or real - or does it just mean it's unfamiliar/unwelcome?
For the USA, the population which is growing the fastest, is the Hispanics. Here, it's the Muslims.
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glanafon (#199) "Can I point out that the last time a single person could claim to know all of the knowledge in the world was at the start of the Italian Renaissance. That applies to you too"
Watch the ETS video, read their report. That should take a couple of days! The rest 30 years or so...
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JadedJean # 195
I think many of us would be greatly interested if you could explain the economic and social benefits of a planned/command economy (as you urging glanafon to vote for) and what special advantages it would have over a purely laissez-faire capitalist one.
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#161 JJ but intelligence is very much a random variable. Give people a chance to prove themselves!"
False, the estimate is 80% heritability ...
You really should not quote numbers without any context. It is totally unscientific, and might be construed as an attempt to win undeserved credibility for your hypotheses. Perhaps you should give yourself an electric shock, or some other suitable behaviourist punishment.
However, in the absence of anything concrete, let us assume you mean IQ, despite its many failings. Suppose someone inherited the mean IQ of 100. Your figure would indicate that this was only 80% of their maximum educable potential of 125: that is approximately 1.67 standard deviations above the mean. IQ is designed to be norm-referenceable, so, looking at my Normal distribution tables, I see that this takes them well into the top 5% of the population assuming everyone else does not receive this special advancement. The point is: education can and does make a considerable difference.
As for the rest of your comments, we are so far apart, that I shall not attempt a point by point refutation, as it would take too long. But one thing in particular struck me as nonsense:
Education is a matter of conformity. Think of maths and engineering. It is a matter of learning effectve (computational) processes.. I could not disagree more! In fact, I would say that useful science is about the ability to use your knowledge creatively and imaginatively. Mathematics too. I have used symmetries in hyperdimensional geometry to solve a neural network modelling problem. Elegant mathematics gets results. However, for those you wish to Bokanovskify into human automatons, no doubt the flag will fly high, and work will make them free.
I am as guilty as anyone of off topic posts, but I am getting rather sick of your regular attempts to hijack these blogs to a very particular agenda. So, one last question before I make an irrevocable decision to retreat behind Matthew ch7 v 6. What actually makes you tick? What gives you joy in your life? You see, there are too many people (eg Scientologists) with their own agendas saying Look at the evidence. Life's too short. There isn't the time for all of them. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to show that, as a human being, you are worth the effort.
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glanafon # 199
"Also being a bit thick I cannot understand how you can pipe massive volumes of borrowed foreign funds into the UK and not notice it."
Because the borrowed foreign funds do not represent an increase in the UK supply of money. The accumulation of UK £s by foreign countries are a part of the existing pool of £s.
Also, check out UK M4 money supply (1998 - 2007).
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JJ PS: As for your regular insinuations about Jews, (eg your last link re Nobel prize winners), perhaps surviving centuries of adversity has made them genetically superior in some way?
(I may be as much as one sixteenth Jewish by the way, but there is Slav, Turkish, German and English too.)
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#191
If that statement had been made by any othr blogger, I would have been very upset. But as it is from one so twisted that they are a stranger to the truth it is in fact a compliment :)
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UNPLEASANT MEDICINCE
sashaclarkson (#203) "You really should not quote numbers without any context."
But I have provided links many times. You clearly just have not followed/understood them.
"It is totally unscientific, and might be construed as an attempt to win undeserved credibility for your hypotheses.
I repeat, follow the [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]links - e.g. the recent Rushton and Jensen article, 5th down here in the wake of Watson and earlier, here. Race, note, is essentially just epidemiologically useful as a 'gene-barrier'. For mroe detail look at the MZ and DZ twin studies, and perhaps then come back with an apology? ;-).
I have repeatedly said that what I am saying in these blogs is 180 degrees at odds with what most non-professionals believe. That is just the way it is, the work is naturally 'suppressed' (not the scare-quotes) as it's politically inconvenient for reasons which I have also explicated at length.
The other 20% of heritability is non-shared environment - look that up too, it's not what you think. Think Child Protection cases.
Your post clearly reveals to me (and knowledgeable others) that you don't know this research. This is no sin itself, until you start contradicting someone who does, without even having looked into it.
You have assumptions which are highly likely to be false. If you reason/act based on those false assumptions are those acts not likely to be misguided? Most teachera are unwitting Lysenkoists. Just ask yourself whether many of your inferences are likely to be false as a consequence. Again, be prepared for a shock. I know you currently 'disagree', but that, after all, is why I have been posting all of this.
Just remember - 180 degrees...
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sashaclarkson (#295) "perhaps surviving centuries of adversity has made them genetically superior in some way?"
Perhaps, perhaps not, but surely, under the circumstances, you should be critically inquiring into what was responsible for any 'adversity'?
If you can find this, by the way, it's worth watching.
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THE TRAGEDY OF INTENSIONAL OPACITY
LibertarianKurt (#202) "I think many of us would be greatly interested if you could explain the economic and social benefits of a planned/command economy (as you urging glanafon to vote for) and what special advantages it would have over a purely laissez-faire capitalist one."
I thought I had? So has Stephanie Flanders and Paul Mason (many time sin his blog). Libertarian (or are they dark-horses?) New Labour keep saying they are worried about the BNP, but surely that's just a bogeyman so people don't clamour for statist Old Labour or the PRC?
With respect to glanafon, I was making a logical point, just as I was with John_from_Hendon. This government, and the Conservatives before them, has prided itself in its anarchism (e.g. light-touch regulation)....and legislateed accordingly. Reading people demanding that the government manages the economy better is a tad ironic!
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204 Lib Kurt
Yeah But, No But, Yeah But.
If at the start of the Brown froth it was known that domestic borrowing and deposits were in balance, and by the end of the froth massive imported funds meant an imbalance, that tells one that it is measurable.
If a housing market overheat is historically measurable by the rough number of transactions, 1 percent being a freeze, 2 percent being normally functioning, and 4 percent being a overheat, this is easy to identify. It is known from the Land Reg monthly figures. Is there not a loose correlation between housing market overheat and market collapse and possibly general recession. So this is another measurable.
Further housing is the main vehicle for individual borrowing. When a very ordinary house is 250K, and a rough rule of thumb doubling this (to allow for periods of high interest rates) gives 500K as the lifetime purchase cost, ie 20K per annum for 25 years. This is a bit of a task for the average person. This is also measurable.
Lets look at another measurable with housing. Plot value. This is where the increase in price is centred as the build cost does not vary very much. But plot value is related to planning permission not the availability of land. Particularly out of large urban environments there is plenty of land. Thats why they are called low density population areas.
There are other measurements of things getting out of hand. The volume of traffic, the number of 2 year old kitchens being ripped out because the granite is the wrong colour and sold for peanuts on online aution sites. Or perhaps the growth in the number of firms selling double glazing is another measurement. If you look at the telephone directory the growth tells you that just around the corner we will all be making double glazing nad selling it to one another.
So in amongst all of this ingenious measuement of other things which leaves this bit in and that bit out, I cannot understand how any economist can miss that things were getting barking mad under Brown. Yet the BoE committee only had Blachflower saying hang on a minute, and he was shouted down. I see he has jacked it in and said he found 2008 a very tough year. Well I can understand, in the early nineties I had a year of going into meeting after meeting and saying where did you park your spaceship this morning fellas. No man is an island uless he is bringing bad news. It is worse than trying to argue with a pot of yoghurt.
Evidently the first time Norman Lamont realised he had lost the ERM FX battle was when he got a cab and the taxi driver told him.
Its not rocket science. There is no rocket and very little science.
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209 jj
This government, and the next one in all probability, only need(ed) a small percentage of the population in key locations to vote for them. Even a 'landslide majority' only demands a minority of the population.
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Whilst H&S do their thing down at memory-hole central ;-).
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glanafon (#211) Sadly true. Hence Liberal-Democracy doesn't work for most people, which is good for some ;-(.
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#172 "I see the PRC has another brilliant policy. Get officals to smoke to boost the economy."
Actually, it's just the officials of one county in one rather poor and rather insignificant province that had this wonderful idea. It appears that their local population had gone up in affluence and can afford "better" ciggies from a neighbouring province and, thereby, reducing the local take on tobacco tax revenues.
It's a bit like, say, the Outer Hebrides asking the locals to smoke more sheep dung ciggies because they (the locals) had become slightly richer and can now afford Woodbine or Embassy that were not made locally and, so, do not benefit to local coffers !! Meanwhile, the rest of the country merrily puffs away on Marlboro Lights in cheerful disdain for those sheep dung ciggies !!
Sneer not at the power of tobacco. Wars have been fought over it. The US tobacco lobby is one of the strongest in the world !!
That said, I have to declare an interest as a 30-a-day puffer !!
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#205 "(I may be as much as one sixteenth Jewish by the way, but there is Slav, Turkish, German and English too.)"
Good God !! You're almost as much of a mess as I am !! And there I was thinking that I was such a bargain, representing seven minorities for the price of one !! :-)
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On a slightly different but still economic vein - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8028865.stm
"As such, Venezuela looks set to remain a country of contradictions, a place where petrol is cheaper than water and where your car increases in value as it gets older."
It looks like that journalist has not been back to Blighty recently !! If he has, he'd know that water (bottled) *IS* more expensive than petrol in this country, too !! And, with massive discounts from about-to-go-bust car manufacturers, new cars *ARE* cheaper than second hand ones in good old Blighty !! Add to that the 2,000 quid "free gift" from HMG for trading in your old banger, oops sorry, I mean creatively rusted artistic transportation, and the comparisons are hauntingly close !!
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ahoy there Stephanites; an interesting post from Stephanie and the graphs illustrate well the inherently mendacious nature of economic analysis.
Like most, I would tend to see the 2nd graph as being a bit more reasonable, but I would believe neither.
Since economics, whether at the personal or governmental level, is largely about confidence (subjective), greed and fear, self-deception etc etc (all those human frailties), it is no surprise that we have the set-up we have and that the dips and dives of the roller-coaster get larger over time.
Turkeys can't vote for Christmas, so of course the US and UK administrations can only desperately try to reinflate; get the Ponzi back on the road asap! Ponzi schemes are everywhere if you look for them, but short-termism dictates that we look the other way: from the housing we live in through to the latest antics from FIAT (traditional acronym being Fix It Again Tony), cheekily saying they will 'buy' up all other failing car makers (no cash involved of course) to form one huge conglomerate of failure. I admire their Bravado (or was it a Punto?)
It is interesting to look at the graphs of Japan for their so-called 'lost decade' and ask ourselves: How was it lost? Are the Japanese poorer, less well-educated, less healthy than the British at the end of this decade (when the UK allegedly had 16 consecutive years of 'growth')? Of course not?
We really need to begin moving away from the growth myth, which as we all know, is entirely unsustainable anyway.
#121 libertariankurt makes a very good point about pyramids and the GDP measurement of useless things
#135 tufftimes the obvious answer (to me anyway) of what could be more useless has to be Trident; 2 new aircraft carriers are close but competition would be tough indeed, as ID cards and many other govt programmes would make a top ten of 'uselessness'
There are lots of ways of measuring the 'growth' resulting from our marvellous advanced economies. We could include a factor for housing, for the contribution of hard-working immigrants (who accounted for a lot of the alleged 2% growth in some years) etc etc. We could discount things we dig up and other non-sustainable elements of the economy. Looking at ancient economies, there are interesting aspects to the study of the huge impact of slavery - M I Finley's 'The Ancient Economy' is worth a read; then think about the influence of the hollowing out of advanced western economies by the movement of more and more industrial production to v. low wage Far Eastern countries and compare it with slavery as a part of the ancient economy of say Rome
One message, I suppose, is that all Empires and systems fall or fail sooner or later
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ELEPHANTS AT WHICH ONE 'DARE' NOT POINT (#203)
There are well fortified citadels of science, with the battlements manned by establishment figures wielding weapons of certainty and Nobel Prizes. (But you already know that.) Such citadels are not devoid of reality, but they are prepared to defend unreality when a paradigm shift is too painful to contemplate. (Scientist are human - nominally. ( Cosmology is a case in point.)
Jaded Jean has an agenda (as do I) and by my judgement it is a mixed bag of zealous, possible-over-statement and judicious understatement, to avoid a clobbering. But when media will not call a spade a spade, one can get a bit wild. For example: Woman's hour was discussing adoption with a bloke who, with his partner, had adopted. Oh - how the interviewer danced round 'now wash your hands'!
Havel gave us the timeless words: 'Living within the lie'. As he made clear: until we step outside the lie, life is truncated - limited. Britian was lied into a war, whose purpose is yet to emerge. The world was lied into debt and collapse - now how did that happen? The BBC is well inside the lie, but these threads manage to puncture the odd hole. However, it takes mavericks to make the effort, and mavericks are not always tractable.
I have been following Jaded Jean's Newsnight postings and checking the links. I believe we share a frustration with creeping paralysis of applied, valid thought in Britain. I am the better informed without being annexed. That'll do nicely.
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Question: Was Mr Brown's Education Speech scrutinized by the Ministry of Information's censors?
#207 put the balancing view.
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217
Trident is indeed useless ... that is of course until someone threatens you with nuclear annihalation. It's hard to whip up a credible nuclear deterrent at short notice. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I think the Millenium Dome and the Olympics have better correspondance with the pyramids, with the Millenium Dome being significantly further up the "uselessness" scale.
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WORDS TO ANYONE REMOTELY RECEPTIVE
#207 If anyone is interested, go to Rushton's website.
On the other hand, anyone with any sense, don't pay any attention to this article especially viz the predictabilty of attainment, as it's done in our schools all the time, in fact, HMG has effectively replaced the need for the widely used commmercial NFER CAT (IQ test) with its own 'Contexual Value Added' (regression for the cognoscenti) model to predict KS3 and KS4 performance from KS2 data. The CAT and SATs have predictive validity of about 0.7.
What I have been posting of the ETS material and its dire implications, is about US SATs and the NAEP, all very much the message of 'The Bell Curve'(1994) sadly.
Still I guess the Guardian article might serve as a salutary warning of precisely why many 'philosphers' should stick to talking about je ne sais quoi? Back in 1969, when the full logical import of 'Two Dogmas of Empircism' (1951) and 'Word and Object' (1960) finally sank in for the brighter ones in their ranks, some said it was time to shut up shop! Clearly the above auther didn't get the message, and as a consequence, many people continue to be sadly misled by such false authorities (via the ad hominem), but we live in neo-liberal, celebrity, product endorsing, times.
With so much else out there which is also false, and with so many people eager to believe it all true, is it really any wonder that we're in such an economic mess?
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Future Goverment is going to make the overpaid NHS Doctors and Consultants, Redundant and replace them with lower paid Chinese and Indian Doctors and Consultants, this will save the NHS Billions.
In this New world of Globalization why should their professions be protected from the effects of Globalization, when the rest of population are being told sorry your companys closing here in the UK and moving to far east to cut costs and increase profits. Its Globalization you have to accept it, a lot of the people in the U.K are watching and we see the top people in the professions getting paid more and more, while the average citizen is being forced to live on Less, we pay the tax for the people at the top, it is time for them to feel some of the pain of Globalization
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erratum #221 'author'.
There are always those amongst us determined to defend their 'beliefs' despite empirical evidence to the contrary... even more now that we have 'care in the community'.
It doesn't bode well :-(
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JadedJean # 202
Sorry, I don't think Ms Flander's article really does explain the structure of a planned/command economy and its inherent economic superiority over a laissez-faire capitalist one. In fact, she concludes her "analysis" - in a typical neo-Keynesian fashion - by bemoaning the fact that the PRC has a huge current account surplus and obscenely high savings which, she falsely believes, has caused a global imbalance of trade leading to the present economic crisis in the US and Western Europe.
If you think the PRC is a good example of a planned/command economy along the lines of the former Soviet Union, then you are mistaken. The PRC is an example of a State controlled corporatist monopoly in which a ruling elite benefits at the expense of hundreds of millions of its citizens who are forced to exist at subsistence or, at least, not far removed from a subsistence level.
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Dear Stephanie,
I love you dearly - your exposition and clarity have won my heart, BUT, this is goodbyeee.
No longer can I stomach, without violence, the assorted cranks, creeps, axe grinders, illiterates and young Tory fogies (not necessarily mutually exclusive) who seek to clog your blog.
Henceforth I will admire from afar.
Goodbye, dear heart, the legion (well. the British Legion club) beckons.
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SIBERIA BECKONS
LibertarianKurt (#224) "The PRC is an example of a State controlled corporatist monopoly in which a ruling elite benefits at the expense of hundreds of millions of its citizens who are forced to exist at subsistence or, at least, not far removed from a subsistence level."
Forgive me, for a moment I completely forgot that you and your ilk don't do empirical reality, and are only receptive to anarchistic/Neocon tribal 'reasoning'.
Yes, the PRC 'party-people' are right old (inscrutable) 'evil-doers'....
Still, with a bit of travel perhaps you could convert them to the wonders of securitization etc.
;-).
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LibertarianKurt (#224) "...hundreds of millions of its citizens who are forced to exist at subsistence or, at least, not far removed from a subsistence level."
With a population of 1.1 billion, even with a mean IQ of 105, about 16% of the PRC population will have an IQ below 85. Given ability/productivity is largely genetic, it's always hard work lifting people out of poverty. We have the same problem here, albeit on a smaller scale (because we have a smaller population). However, as the PRC has eugenics legislation, and as we proscribe it (and thus have to endure dysgenic fertility whilst the PRC benefits from its 1995 eugenics legislation), we'll continue to get worse whilst they'll get stronger.
Whilst the PRC regulates and governs its people in everyone's best interests, we become ever more more anarchistic and irrational consumers of nonsense.
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JadedJean # 226
[chuckles] Your response quite clearly indicates you haven't the remotest idea of what a planned/command economy is, have you?
Therefore, I will not dwell on the point any longer; we'll leave it there for now ;)
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Not the "Productivity scam" again ! - What is productivity ? Think about it : Is it output per £ ? Well as tomatoes per £ have been going up since the dawn of time so the trend in productivity must be going down : They used to be 2p per pound and now they can be £1 per pound. Is it then inflation adjusted price per pound ? - In this case, given the RPI is meant to cover a basket of goods, the productivity trend must be zero over the whole economy always by definition. Is it pints of beer served per barman ? - This goes up and down depending on how many customers are in the bar and is a function of how much money the customers have. Is it how many cars a factory produces/per worker ? - well car factories now work on an order basis - as do many other factories. No longer are as many cars produced as possible then stored - cars are made to order so car production per worker is a function of how many new car orders have been placed by customers, which is, once again a function of how much money the customers have. So if your charts show anything they show orders which shows how much money or (credit card) customers have - and we know things have been a bit tight recently.
With modern machines Think photocopies the concept of productivity is totally redundant : A medieval scribe might produce 10 letters a day, another scribe 12 letters a day and the second scribe might be claimed to be more productive; but if a modern secretary did 3,000 photocopies in one day is she more productive than one who did only 200 in one day ? no you just type the number of photocopies in the machine you want and press the button - the difference in what the secretaries produce is merely a function of the photocopies they were requested to make !
Steph get rid of those old economics books you have that were written before the invention of modern machinery and learn things like NEFS -economics and finance for the machine age at www.worldnews.blog-city.com
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erratum (#227) "With a population of 1.1 billion, even with a mean IQ of 105, about 16% of the PRC population will have an IQ below 90".
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LibertarianKurt (#228) ["chuckles] Your response quite clearly indicates you haven't the remotest idea of what a planned/command economy is, have you?"
They don't exist (i.e are not viable) in your world. They either get re-branded (as above with the PRC), or where not sanctioned economically (e.g. Zimbabwe), are subjected to 'liberation' via Human Rights movements, dissidents, and 'shock-therapy' where vouchers and oligarchs liberate the poor oppressed people from the evils of their state.
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#227
"Whilst the PRC regulates and governs its people in everyone's best interests, we become ever more more anarchistic and irrational consumers of nonsense."
Now now, Quine would turn in in his grave that statement cannot be true in reation to he PRC. As for us then perhaps you are finally getting a slight understanding of the real meaning of behaviour and no the abstracted nonesense that you keep spouting.
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fortedeckdave (#232) "..As for us then perhaps you are finally getting a slight understanding of the real meaning of behaviour and no the abstracted nonesense that you keep spouting."
Matters seem 'abstract' to those who have limited understanding and cling to what's familiar. Perhaps in time, with persistence (and much suffering and gnashing of teeth in your case), that will become clearer, even to you ;-).
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#233 Richardtete,
For a one dimensional bigot you have a very high but false sense of your own abilties and importance. That, you have no real understanding of economics, politics and history you have proved in your postings. That you manage to dismiss any research that does not fit your limited view is transparent.
You can continue to dismiss, to hector and belittle, it matters not. The pity is you really don't seem happy even in your blinkered view of reality!
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foredeckdave (#234) One gets the impression that people like yourself are unable to discern what is real from what is propaganda/spin even when others provide evidence backed instructions on how to go about doing so. For people like yourself, appearance is all. The (sadly all too rare) essence of all worthwhile skills is the seeking out and welcoming of constructive criticism, not justifying one's errors when corrected. Research should be empirical and cumulative not argumentative.
Texts in physics and chemistry, behaviour genetics etc provide evidence in different areas of research, not arguments. Political 'scientists', economists, and historians do not research in the same 'Pursuit of Truth' way. You may have noted that most economists' forecasts and analyses have just resulted in bickering and error. I tried to show you why, clearly to no avail.
Look up the term projection in the context of narcissism.
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#220 "Trident is indeed useless ... that is of course until someone threatens you with nuclear annihalation. It's hard to whip up a credible nuclear deterrent at short notice. Hindsight is a wonderful thing."
An interesting point *BUT* if that is valid, then why are both the US and UK making such a fuss over North Korea and Iran, neither of whom have any nuclear armed submarines ??
China has lots of submarines but not a single one is nuclear armed !! In fact, a lot of them were build on a U-boat design nicked from the Nazis in the late 1930s !!
While I am not absolutely sure, I think both India and Pakistan don't have nuclear armed subs either although both have been nuclear powers for many years now !!
Therefore, I think, as Mr. Pirate does, that both the Trident(s) and the aircraft carriers are high on the list of uselessness. Britain cannot afford another war with Argentina over Malvinas/Falklands !!
Then again, Mr. Pirate would say that, wouldn't he ?? It would make his job of hijacking more ships *that* much easier !! :-)
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#222 "Future Goverment is going to make the overpaid NHS Doctors and Consultants, Redundant and replace them with lower paid Chinese and Indian Doctors and Consultants, this will save the NHS Billions."
I don't know anything about "low paid Indian doctors" but there aren't that many "low paid Chinese doctors" around any more. Those that have not departed for greener pastures had jobs in the brand spanking new private hospitals that pay better than the NHS ever will !!
If the NHS cannot even compete with BUPA in terms of pay, how can they compete with the private health systems in the Far East where the pay is among the highest in the world !! Then again, the fees charged are also among the highest in the world !!
Then there are also the cultural and linguistic barriers that the Chinese don't have in the Far East and the Indians(1) don't have coming to work for the NHS !!
Note 1: - By Indians, it is assumed to cover the inhabitants of the Indian Sub-continent and not just the country of India. This term includes Pakistanis as well as Bangladeshis !! And, whatever else you do, DON'T MENTION THE GURKHAS !! Our Glorious Leader is rather upset with them at the moment !! Ayo Gurkhali !! :-)
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#236
Hmmm. So you're arguing that the only point of having submarines capable of firing nuclear missiles is to counter the threat posed by other countries submarines. A poor argument.
China may not have any nuclear submarines. It does however have ICBM's and pretty sophisticated ballistic missile technology and enough rocketry experience to put people into orbit.
North Korea and Iran do not yet have credible ICBM technology, but recent rocket launch tests reveal that it is on its way. Maybe in 10 years or so they will have mature ICBM technology. We can't decide whether we want to match that technology on a yearly timescale. If we decide to abandon the nuclear deterrent it could be 5 years before we can build up to having a replacement. you can't just click your fingers and make things like that happen next week. Note that's five years of being held to ransom by someone threatening to fire a nuke at you.
The UK and the US are making a fuss regarding Iran and North Korea because the best strategy is for your opponents not to have nuclear weapons in the first place. Then the next best is for them to realise if they use them its going to have some pretty serious consequences (a deterrent).
India and Pakistan do not have ICBM technology, but they are capable of lauching short range nuclear strikes at each other. India does have the capaibility to launch satellites and one can only assume that ICBM technology is not far off.
In summary the world is becoming a lot more dangerous and as time progresses will only become more so as more nations acquire not only nuclear technology, but the means to deliver it. There are many, many good arguments for and against the independent nuclear deterrent. But yours isn't one of them.
The Falklands War cost Britain around £3 billion in 1990's cash, which is trivial compared to the cost of the bank bailouts and numerous other ongoing projects. Britain clearly can afford another Falklands War. Not only that, it would utimately be a lot easier to defeat the Argentines now than in 1982, as their current non military government has not been investing in military technology in the 30 years since the war was fought.
Whether it would be sensible or morally correct to do so or not is another issue.
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212. JadedJean
Thanks for the useful link to Heritability of IQ in this post.
Note 1 in which the concept was rubbished by Steven Rose (2006) was illuminating. I especially like the following:
" Heritability estimates become a way of applying a useless quantity to a socially constructed phenotype and thus apparently scientizing ita clear-cut case of Garbage In, Garbage Out.
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#140 "we are led to believe that the reason they did [imprudent lending] was because they believed their risks were covered by securitization/CDOs/CSDs - i.e they were insured?"
Imagine you have a sports car and enjoy speed. You have bought an insurance covering 100% of any damage, will this encourage you to drive recklessly? On the other hand, assume that doctors will rebuild you body to perfection, painlessly and for free if you crash, will this encourage you to drive recklessly?
In any case, there exist no financial or insurance tool capable to eliminate the risk arising from imprudent lending. All you can do is transfer the risk to the fool you are selling your junk bond/toxic asset to. It is to the advantage of the banks to shift the blame onto financial tools if that helps persuade the government to bail them out.
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#240 You are absolutely correct. The many of the banks want all the benefits without any of the costs. They want the high returns of the risky businesses without taking on any of the risks !! When that blew up in their faces, they went whining to mama and asked to be kissed better !! And then they expected to get ice cream as well, i.e massive bonuses and pension payouts !!
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