ja_mageia

Towards the end of the 19th century and increasingly into the 20th and 21st, politicians and intellectuals became convinced by the idea that they could run the country through central planning than the individual decisions of each and every person acting in their own interest. In this climate of control they usurped and marginalised private schooling, planning centrally what had previously occurred spontaneously. In time the “bog standard comprehensive” came to be the model for all but the richest.

Tony Blair used the term “bog standard comprehensive” in a conference speech, which was coined by the now repentant Peter Hyman. Perhaps it is discourteous to the many talented professionals working in the toughest schools, but its popular usage attests to the fact that it captures the essence of the state we’re in. The “bog” evokes images of stagnation – and this is exactly what has happened under a system directed centrally by the government. While freer industries have thrived in conditions of competition and innovation, centrally planned schooling has languished behind.

Schooling is long overdue for a shakeup to release the talents of the students currently stuck in the quagmire. As an industry, teaching methods are firmly entrenched in the past. For example, most children don’t learn to speak a language despite spending their lives sitting for hundreds of hours in a classroom attempting to do so. Even those with top grades can’t hold a basic conversation. As the language expert Paul Noble points out: “Students realise that even if they do get a GCSE in French, they still won't be able to speak the language”. In contrast, private companies guarantee that business people will learn more than this in a couple days.

This is not a call for another revision of the national curriculum and a new national strategy to push all children into intensive language lessons. This would entirely miss the point. Instead we need to free schools, and the first way this could be done is to allow them to run for a profit. As with any service industry, experimentation would become the norm and best practice would be copied where appropriate. Education companies abroad are ready to invest, while there are many companies in the UK currently teaching adults various skills that would be able to add immense value to teaching children. Without this change, most will be left mired neck-deep in an unwholesome bog standard education.

The pressure has risen this week on the Chinese government to address their stance on universal rights and political reform. In the fallout from  Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the debate has reignited over the Chinese government’s attitude to freedom of speech and its detention of political activists. The issue has escalated over the past few days with the release of open letters to the Chinese government, one from a group of Communist elders and another on Thursday night released by a group of writers, lawyers and activists.

These letters aim to highlight the lack of freedom in the country, attacking the repressive government that not only controls the public’s freedom of speech but also their own officials’. Even China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is not immune, with his speeches that include references to political reform being censored within China. Unfortunately, it appears that so far the impact of these letters has been limited – Chinese Twitter users say that all references to them have been deleted by the government from Chinese message boards. However, with the increasing growth in online social media as a form of communication it is hard to see how Chinese censorship on such issues is sustainable.

The 5th Plenum of the Communist Party of China began this weekend in Beijing, and it is hoped by the signatories of both papers that their actions will influence the speed of political reform. The letter released yesterday claims that, if it truly wants become a “great nation” and a key player on the world stage, China must embrace universal rights. The Chinese government cannot insulate its internal repression from international scrutiny any more – though it currently appears that the Chinese government is resisting calls for political reform, external and internal pressure can’t be ignored forever. Let’s hope that the risk taken by these few brave men and women in speaking out is not in vain and that someday China will become a country where universal rights prevail and the people are free.

Stolen Borrowed from Brad DeLong:

As the professor points out, the countries are matched as to rough starting point before the communist armies marched, matched roughly as to culture and so on, and yet after that series of communist experiments we see the same result everywhere. The reason?

Karl Marx, you see, completely missed the utility of markets as devices for providing decision makers with proper incentives and for achieving allocative efficiency. (Why he missed this is, I think, a result of his crazy metaphysics of value, but I won't go there today.) He saw markets only as surplus extraction devices--ways to quickly and fully separate the powerless from the value that they had created and that ought to have been theirs.

So when the Communists took over, they followed Marx and said: "we don't want no stinking markets in our economies." This naturally raised the question of how they were then to coordinate economic activity. And they hit on the clever plan of attempting to reproduce the Rathenau-Ludendorff Imperial German war economy of World War I. And they did so.

We really do want markets in everything. We might want to compensate, after the fact, for some of their effects, we might insist upon care being provided to those who cannot cope with them but we really would like markets to be the basis of resource allocation. Yes, even in education and medicine.

Please note, this is absolutely nothing at all to do with capitalism, with what should be the level of redistribution in the society, what top tax rates should be nor even patriarchy, the oppression of women or the Rape of Gaia.

Use markets first foremost and always, then clean up the bits of the results we don't like afterwards: absolutely not the other way around, not using markets because we fear we won't like some of the results.

Britain's immigration policy is wrong-headed and detrimental to its economy, as recent events have shown. (I should declare an interest as an immigrant from the Republic of Ireland now permanently resident in the UK.)

Many have followed the saga of X-Factor contestant Gamu Nhengu. A talented singer, Gamu was seen as having a good chance of winning the talent show until doubts over her immigration status meant that she was removed from the show. The issue was that her mother allegedly claimed benefits while working, and it now seems likely that she will be deported to her home country of Zimbabwe.

Harry Phibbs has already written on this topic over at ConservativeHome, and the case is an example of the problems in the British immigration system. Gamu is an adult – why should what her mother does be relevant to her immigration status? And isn’t it a clear loss to Britain to lose this entertainer to a potentially brutal fate in Zimbabwe? Obviously Gamu is getting special attention because she is in the public eye – how many others are deported in similar situations without any attention at all? It’s surprising that so many on the right are (correctly) sceptical about the effectiveness of government programmes, but forget this when considering the supposed need for immigration control.

More happily, the UK-based winners of both the Nobel Prize for Physics and Economics are immigrants from Russia and Cyprus respectively. Whatever the full benefits of scientific breakthroughs taking place in the UK, it’s undoubtedly good for students at British universities to be taught by people of this calibre. Plenty of entrepreneurs come to Britain to escape worse regulatory environments and set up wealth-creating businesses. Many others come to work here and, as Bryan Caplan has recently been arguing on his blog, even low-skilled immigrants increase the wages of native workers, if those immigrants are allowed to work.

Immigrants are good for everybody – they make Britons richer and they make better lives for themselves. If there is a danger of ‘welfare tourism’, an easy solution could be to charge for use of public services for a certain period of an immigrant’s time in the UK. But most immigrants who come to Britain don’t want to sponge off the country – like Gamu Nhengu and the Nobel-winning Russian physicists at Manchester, they want to be the best they can in a free and open society. We should let them.

From Mikhail Gorbachov's memoirs:

The costs of labour, fuel, and raw material per unit of production were two to two and a half times higher than the developed countries, while in agriculture they were ten times higher. We produced more coal, oil, metals, cement and other materials (except for synthetics) than the Unmited States, but our end product was less than half that of the USA.

And that is, note, valuing Soviet production the way the Soviets did: way, waaay, too highly.

This is what the absence of markets does to you over 70 years of compounding. Or of not compounding if you prefer, talking about the small but continual improvements in efficiency markets bring us each and every year.

We can get all theoretical about this, invoke Hayek and insist that knowledge is local and that the centre can never plan in sufficient detail to make those little incremental steps which so contribute to that increased efficiency. We can get all empirical and simply note what did in fact happen in those economies without markets. We can even get all bolshie and simply insist that we'll do things our way, as free people, rather than being automatons programmed by the Man in Whitehall.

But the takeaway argument is that we really do want markets in everything. Yes, in education, higher education and even in health care. We might well want to have "markets light", with State financing, we might well desire (I certainly do) a welfare safety net underneath it all, but we really do want those markets so that we get, as we did over the last century, that ever increasing efficiency of production.

You know, efficiency, that essential and basic desire of lazy and greedy human beings everwhere: the most we can get out of what's available.

This week Minister for Education Michael Gove cut seven educational quangos, partially scaling back Whitehall’s interferences into schooling. This is good news, but there is still much more to be done to reform schooling in the UK. One area that needs to be focused on is the liberalisation of the teaching profession, allowing different routes into the profession and more choice for schools over who they employ.

As things stand, anyone who wants to teach in a state school in the UK must have a QTS (Qualified Teacher Status), which means that they must have undertaken some form of government-led teacher training in the form of a PGCE or GTP. Having taken a PGCE, I can vouch for the fact that attaining the QTS is largely a time-consuming paperwork exercise, as potential teachers attempt to prove their ability to achieve things such as ‘promoting equality and inclusion within teaching’ and other abstract ideas created by the TDA. Far more valuable was the hands-on training I received placed within a school, where I had the advice of fellow teachers and a mentor who could share best practices with me.

In light of this, I really don’t see the argument for the continuation of centralised teacher training to achieve QTS. Training should take place within a school, with state schools allowed to recruit graduates and train them on the job without the involvement of a higher education provider. But more than that, I believe the QTS should not be a necessary requirement to teach. Independent schools within the UK often choose to employ teachers who have not undergone formal teacher training, recognising that other factors make a good teacher, such as previous professional experience and an expertise in their subject area. In fact, some of my most inspiring teachers had never taken a teacher training course, but were passionate about education with an infectious enthusiasm for the subject. However, today too many potential teachers are driven away from teaching in the state sector by the continual interference of government, their lack of freedom to teach what they want and the heavy paperwork and planning requirements necessary when working towards their QTS.

So it's time the government got serious about giving teachers more freedom by giving the schools more autonomy. They need to let the schools take charge of teacher training once more, let them make their own judgement calls on who to employ and train, and remove the barriers of entry into teaching created by the compulsory QTS.

Today the Adam Smith Institute releases a new report, Privatization Revisited, which calls on the government to undertake a radical new programme of privatization. There are still many attractive commercial operations in the public sector that should be privatized – for instance, Channel 4, BBC Worldwide, Scottish Water, Network Rail and many other firms. The report also calls for the government’s shares in RBS and Lloyd’s TSB to be sold off gradually over the term of the current government. Together, these privatizations would raise up to £90billion over a period of several years (see the table below).


The report argues that many benefits would accrue if its proposals were implemented in full – particularly in terms of operational efficiencies. The major privatization wave under the Thatcher government opened up much of Britain’s industry to competition and helped the British economic miracle of the 1980s. In times like this, a return to this approach is required to rejuvenate parts of the British economy.

Britain’s national debt is approaching one trillion pounds and interest repayments are nearly £120 million every day. With this report, the government now has an instruction manual in how to begin paying down this debt and simultaneously jumpstarting the flagging British economy.

As Sam pointed out on Wednesday, Lord Browne’s report is to be largely welcomed. However, Vince Cable, after initially praising the report, has now raised concerns about what he calls “unlimited fees” and declared that the system needs to be more progressive than it is now. There is a real risk that Browne’s ‘free-market lite’ approach will become a spaghetti soup of regulation.

It is disingenuous to call a system with no cap unlimited when it will be limited by competition. Nobody talks of the unlimited price of shoes, and for good reason. In a free market, universities will be able to charge what people are willing to pay for it and not a penny more. Prices will be driven down by competing providers.

To address Cable progressive concerns is rather easy. Free market reforms would progressive. Currently university education amounts to a transfer of money from present non-graduates to future graduates. Putting the cost burden onto the beneficiaries of higher education is to use the buzzword of the moment “fair”.

There is a real risk that Vince Cable will want to set another cap, higher than the last but no less foolhardy. Fee caps artificially increase the demand for university places, cause students to be less engaged and demanding about their course, and ultimately decrease investment in higher education. This last point is crucial, as universities need more money if they are to be able more offer targeted bursaries to poorer students.

The unions are of course up in arms about any reforms. The student unions are misguidedly trying to protect their members from fee increases, while the teaching unions are concerned that their members might lose their jobs. This is all framed in concern for the poorest, but they are barking up the wrong tree if their concerns are real.

If access to university from poorer sections of society concerns them, they should be looking at the quality of education received prior to university and looking into the vast difference in quality between schools that are run and regulated by the government and those that aren’t. To reduce this gap we need innovation and investment. Vouchers and for-profit schools are the way forward. And for those that don’t go on to university? Well, at least there will be less chance of them being illiterate and innumerate, unable to find someone willing employ them on at the minimum wage.

It is reassuring to see that the “new” generation has got a good grasp on the economic path that needs to be taken if the UK is to reverse its national debt. I'm not talking about Ed Miliband's new shadow cabinet, but the 18-24 year olds polled by Radio 1 about how they, the “new” generation, felt about the imminent cuts.

The poll showed that 62% of 18-24 year olds believe that cuts are necessary, and when asked whether they would prefer cuts or tax hike, 76% went with cuts. This shows that the proposals outlined by Lord Browne yesterday, in regards to University funding, should be welcomed by students above the previously muted graduate tax – what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It also gives the lie to the idea that young people are generally left-wing. Just because "student leaders" are loudly Marxist doesn't mean that the people they claim to represent are – most are elected with very low participation by an active minority, with the majority of students staying far away from the process. As in many groups of people, there is a silent majority of the young who simply want to be left alone to live their lives as they wish.

It is not just this younger generation, who arguably may not feel the full impact of the proposed cuts, who believe the coalitions cuts are necessary. A recent ICM poll showed that a majority of voters support axing child benefit for high earners. The same survey indicates that people would rather see cuts in welfare than in defence or education.

It appears that these recent polls show a swing towards rationality, particularly where cuts are involved. We cannot continue to live either, individually or as a nation on credit. Both individuals and the government have to take responsibility for their past actions; only when we acknowledge the problem can it start to be fixed. I'm glad that so many others agree.

The Evening Standard reports that cocaine use has fallen 14% this year (based on the number of addicts seeking treatment) due to dealers lowering the purity of their product. This illustrates a number of problems with drug prohibition.

The principle problem is the limit to regulatory oversight that can be exercised on the trade due to its illegality. This doesn't just mean government regulation, but the potent voices of consumer groups, the media, and competition, which don't resort to violent means. It is a testament to the power of the market that even considering the power of drug addiction, they have recognised the drop in drug quality and gone in search of substitutes.

Just imagine if the media could easily report on specific cases of drug dealers adding cancer-inducing substances to their products. Imagine if consumer groups could easily assess legal dealers, approving some, and destroying the bad ones through boycotts and low ratings, with addicts easily able to switch suppliers without the threat of violence. Imagine drugs sold with no risk to the dealer, no longer having to rely on the protection of violent gangs for a cut of the profits, but on the law. Coupled with the legalisation of prostitution, how would gangs, terrorist groups and sex traffickers then finance themselves?

The illegal drugs market is dangerous and flawed precisely because it is illegal. "Market failures" of low quality, even dangerous products, along with powerful suppliers with local monopolies enforced by violence, are all caused by prohibition. Without any oversight or the ability of consumers to gain information about the products they buy, dangerous substances will always be used to bulk out the powders sold. Without drug users able to come to the law for help, they will often become pressured and coerced by criminals who are happy to use violence instead of trading. It is remarkable that consumer pressures could have had an effect even with all these obstacles presented to them. The effects of the market with these obstacles lifted would be almost miraculous.