Category: Society

Where USS puts its money

UK academics are all aware that the nationwide pension scheme, called the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), believes itself to have a huge budget shortfall, that can only be resolved with major cuts to pensions for future retirees (but no cut at all to current retirees, for some reason). So it was with some interest that I read about the recent crash of the national air traffic control system, caused by persistent underinvestment in critical infrastructure by the public-private company Nats:

Nats became a public-private partnership in 2001 under the last Labour government. It is 42% owned by Airlines Group, whose shareholders include the University Superannuation Scheme, British Airways, Monarch Airlines retirement benefit plan, easyJet, Virgin Atlantic, Deutsche Lufthansa, Thomson Airways and Thomas Cook Airlines.

Examination socialism

I was talking with someone recently about the bizarre British practice of allowing the A-level exams to be set by competing exam boards. It’s bizarre because of the well-known agency problems in examinations: The customers are the schools, whose interest is in high marks, not in effective exams. So we get government ministers persistently fulminating against watering-down of exams.

This is typically presented as a capitalist approach, reflecting the British enthusiasm for market-based solutions instead of big government. In fact, while this solution has the trappings of capitalism, it suffers all the theoretical and practical defects of socialism. As I understand it, those who theorise the superiority of capitalism tend to focus on the diffusion of decision-making to the periphery, where the expertise resides, and the virtues of aligning incentives with goals, which is far more efficient than central planning. Then comes the bracing effect of competition to achieve those goals.

In this case, the natural incentives of those looking to make a profit by selling their product to schools are clearly misaligned. Yes, they can fruitfully compete on accuracy and speed of marking, but the essential content and rigour of the exams is a race to the bottom. (This might not be the case if they were providing distinct qualifications, that might be competing for influence with universities. There is the competing International Baccalaureate, adding an extra level of complexity, but the multiple exam boards are supposed to be producing evaluations of the same qualification, the A-levels. We have a similar problem with university degrees, where there seems to be a pious fiction that “first-class degree” is an absolute standard, whether from Imperial or London Metropolitan; but this is clearly not taken very seriously.) The bottom is set by elaborate government regulations — central planning — and all the competitive ingenuity goes into formally hitting those standards while maximising the marks. (I don’t know if this is really true; but that is what you would predict, theoretically, and it would explain the downward spiral of A-levels.)

Are you demographic? part 2

I was just eavesdropping on a conversation by a notorious American expatriate Republican, who likes to preach to the heathens British. I can see the appeal for both sides: He gets to spool out superficial right-wing talking points without being challenged, because his interlocutor has no sense of the details; and the Brits feel like they’re hearing some inside dope that sounds entirely different than the line they get from the British press. For instance, America is two nations — coasts and interior (presumably the Great Lakes count as oceans for this purpose) — and that the liberal coastal states are about to sink under the weight of their unfunded mandates

So the future belongs to heartland Republicans, and one reason, he explains, is that the liberal Babylon is losing population to the right-thinking interior. This isn’t entirely true: West coast states are all growing at above-average rates, as are Maryland and Delaware. It’s mostly the industrial Midwest that’s sinking. But the argument is based on an assumption that geography is destiny. Growing the demographic power of staunchly Republican states is not the same thing as growing the demographic power of Republicans.

People don’t adopt the political colours of their new homes (as this fellow should surely understand) rapid growth of North Carolina and Virginia, for example, has been linked to migration from less conservative regions, and to urbanisation, both of which have converted reliably Republican-voting states into Democratic-leaning ones. Population growth in Florida, Texas, Colorado, and Nevada has been cited by many experts as harbingers of future Democratic strength, as much of the increase is coming in Hispanic populations, who have shown much higher affinity with the Democrats.

(The habit of describing ethnic minority voters as being demographically determined was the target of my previous Are you demographic? post.)

 

What people don’t know about the NHS

… is that it is incredibly cheap. I was speaking recently with a British colleague, who asked how I liked being back in the UK after a year on sabbatical. I mentioned that there are things I really appreciate about living in California, but one of the things I like best about the UK is the NHS. Even without any significant health problems in the family, the incomparable irrationality of the US healthcare system (though even calling it a “system” seems overly generous) is palpably unnerving, at the very least since you’re occasionally confronted with the question of whether this or that problem is significant enough to go to the hospital for, and then you have to consider whether it’s worth entering into a multiyear negotiation over fictional bills for thousands of dollars.

Anyway, I remarked that I wish the UK would just raise its health spending to the European average, that it would be far and away the best in the world, as opposed to limping along as it does now, being the best for equality, but clearly overstretched, and not quite matching the top national healthcare systems. I thought this was simply a platitude, but he seemed genuinely surprised by the claim. On further questioning, he said that he would have thought the NHS was relatively expensive compared with healthcare in western Europe generally.

In fact, UK health expenditures are low, not just compared with the wealthy countries of western and northern Europe, but with respect to the EU generally — including the relatively poor countries of eastern Europe. They would have to spend an additional 6 billion pounds — about a 5% increase — to match the EU average. In 2011 the UK was below average healthcare spending for the OECD, and was still only average after removing the exceptionally high spending USA. (The US, despite the notoriously expensive private healthcare system of which its right-thinking populace is so proud, has considerably more public healthcare expenditure per capita than the UK, on top of the private system. And life expectancy is still several years shorter.)

I wonder if the public would demand more spending on the NHS, rather than accepting the government line about necessary efficiencies and the magic of privatisation, if they knew how efficient the NHS already is, and how little they are spending on healthcare compared with their European neighbours, not to mention the profligate Americans and Canadians.

 

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The men in the white vans

Should I be surprised that after living in this country for seven years there’s still a lot that I don’t know about the culture? I was genuinely confused by the furorethat led to the drumhead expulsion of Emily Thornberry from the Labour shadow cabinet, following her tweeting this picture.B25NbWHIUAAJxsy.jpg-largeThere was no text, other than a note that this was from Rochester yesterday, where the anti-immigrant UKIP was expected to win a by-election. Yet, everyone seems to agree that publishing this photograph shows elitist contempt for the good people of Rochester. It’s not clear that anyone can explain it to me either. Ed Miliband told the press

Asked what reaction he felt when he saw such an image, Mr Miliband said “respect”. He added: “I thought there was nothing unusual or odd, as her tweet implied, about having England flags in your window. “That’s why I was so angry about it and that’s why I think it’s right that she resigned.”

Now, granted that Ed Miliband is not the most eloquent speaker, or the most coherent thinker, but if his reaction to the image was “respect”, and that “there was nothing unusual or odd”, how did the tweet imply that it was unusual or odd? It reminds me of the joke about the woman who rings the police to complain about the man who regularly walks by her house whistling dirty tunes. (It’s a bit of a “protests too much” response, since it is surely a bit odd to have two very large flags hanging on the house, one of which is completely blocking a window.)

Part of the response seems to follow from the stereotype that hovers around the white van in the driveway, which I had never heard of, but according to Wikipedia the driver is

perceived as selfish, inconsiderate, mostly working class and aggressive. According to this stereotype, the “white van man” is an independent tradesperson, such as a plumber or locksmith, self-employed, or running a small enterprise, for whom driving a commercial vehicle is not the main line of business, as it is for a professional freight-driver.

The origin of “tool” use

I always thought that the word “tool”, used to mean a fool easily manipulated, particularly by advertising or consumer marketing (though more recent usages have veered closer to “unfashionable” for those who don’t believe they follow fashions) was a recent neologism, derived from the 1960s phrase “capitalist tool”. The capitalist tool was the pendant to the “commie symp”, and there’s a nice parallelism in the way “tool” rhymes with “fool” (which rhymes with “pool”) and “symp” is like “simp”.

I just happened across a piece of 1760s political doggerel in Robert Middlekauf’s history of the American Revolution, an attack on Massachusetts state representative James Otis, Jr., called Jemmibullero:

And Jemmy is a silly dog, and Jemmy is a tool,

And Jemmy is a stupid curr, and Jemmy is a fool.

And Jemmy is a madman, and Jemmy is an ass,

And Jemmy has a leaden head and forehead spread with brass.

The value of diagnosis

What is diagnosis worth, if there is no treatment? This is a perennial question in medical ethics. I recall a passage in Roy Porter’s history of medicine, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, referring to the sardonic praise heaped upon the clinic in Vienna (I think it was), where the magisterial diagnoses were always “swiftly confirmed at the autopsy”.

An article in Salon recounts the revelation from autopsy that comedian Robin Williams was suffering from Lewy body dementia at the time of his recent suicide. The article quotes the programming director of the Lewy Body Dementia Association, saying “Though his death is terribly sad, it’s a good opportunity to inform people about this disease and the importance of early diagnosis.” I know this is the sort of thing that someone in her position is required to say, but given that there is no cure, and very little by way of effective treatment, I wonder what “importance of early diagnosis” she is referring to, and what she takes the relevance of this event in particular to be. That early diagnosis allows you to know what’s happening while you’re still fit enough to take your own life?

Holes in the Brussels underwear

One felicitous phrase that has long stuck in my mind, and even substantively affected my thinking, came at the end of an essay by Garrison Keillor, on the social value of hypocrisy. He told of a small town that lost multiple upstanding citizens, including the minister, to serial revelations of adultery. “Sinners are more important to a town’s economy than saintly people are, and they are better citizens. A gnawing sense of guilt makes them more willing to serve on committees.” He concludes with a paean to the communities built by

people with enough holes in their underwear to make them careful crossing streets.

I wonder if EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker may be just such a person. The Commission is under pressure to take action against tax avoidance schemes. He is being attacked by some for his role in making tax fraud the driving engine of the Luxembourg economy during his many years as prime minister. His embarrassment has become particularly acute since investigative journalists recently published secret Luxembourg government files on corporate tax affairs. But maybe this makes him just the person to oversee the cleanup. It’s not just the “takes a thief to catch a thief”, knowing-where-the-bodies-are-buried qualification. It’s that he’s sufficiently embarrassed by his past misdeeds to be seeking redemption through honourable work, and he knows that whatever he does will receive an extra measure of scrutiny.

While I’m on the topic, I just want to mention again how irritating I find the disclaimers that always appear in articles on this topic, that “These arrangements… are perfectly legal.” This is wrong for two reasons:
1. Often the laws pertaining to international tax arrangements allow certain transfers to be made for valid business reasons, but not for the purpose of avoiding taxes. Now, they are structured in such a way as to make it impossible to prove that tax avoidance was the purpose, so they can’t be convicted in court, but that’s different from “legal”. As I commented before, it’s like pushing someone off a cliff when no one else is around. No one can prove that it was murder, but that’s different from it being legal.
2. These arrangements are extremely complicated. Their legality depends upon the precise details of how they are structured. This means that only a very careful analysis of the details can determine whether they are indeed legal. What the journalists have found out is that Luxembourg basically rubber-stamped the reports, suggesting that the details have not been authoritatively vetted by anyone. If someone is making good-faith attempts to comply with the law, then it seems fair to treat the result as presumptively valid. If, on the other hand, he is making every effort to evade the intention of the law through technical compliance, then it seems fair to judge only the technical accomplishment of the task, and hammer him for any technical error, even it’s just a misplaced comma.
Live by the technicality, die by the technicality.

Alleged allegations

Do journalists even think about where they’re putting the word “alleged” as an incantation to ward off accusations that they might be making unproven accusations of criminality? Here’s a paragraph from today’s Guardian:

Scotland Yard has launched a criminal investigation into claims a child was killed by a paedophile ring alleged to have high-level connections to the establishment.

The Guardian understands the claim involves the alleged killing of a child during the alleged activities carried out by members of the ring.

There was an alleged killing during alleged activities. Shouldn’t that be “alleged members of the alleged ring”? If it turns out the members didn’t actually carry out any activities, then they wouldn’t really constitute a “ring”, would they? Conversely, if this was a “paedophile ring”, as the first sentence asserts, implicit in that is that there were activities, including paedophile activities, so why are they referred to as “alleged activities”? Perhaps “alleged child”, if it’s not yet clear if this particular crime has any basis in reality.