Avoiding GOM status

[peterbirks]

I haven't blogged so far this weekend because I wanted to resist heading blindly into a "what is the world coming to?" rant. This reached its peak this morning when Imogen Stubbs (married to Trevor Nunn) told of how she had to stop "helping" her daughter with her English A level studies because these days any sign of imagination on the part of A Level examinees is frowned upon.

The whole article is on the front page of the Sunday Times News Review, so anyone too mean to pay a couple of quid won't be able to read it. I will, however, give you one quote of justification for this madness, from an English teacher:

"I think the danger of being the slightly eccentric teacher full of flair is that you don't cater to all the pupils in the class. There are pupils with flair, but there are other pupils. And they greatly benefit from the asssessment objectives because they are signposts that give them confidence".

Or, translated into English, useless pupils benefit from the current regime because it makes them feel good about themselves.

One is irresistibly reminded of the science fiction story where talented ballet dancers had to wear weights when performing, and talented singers were stopped from singing, because this made everyone more equal.

Trevor Nunn took a paper on Hamlet under examination conditions, as did Adam Long, co-founder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Nunn got a "mid-B". Imagination, apparently, is a handicap when doing English A Level. Throw in talent and flair, and you are doomed.

Many pupils who did well confessed to not even reading the whole text. Instead they read revision books and web sites on how to give the right answers. "This is the conventional view of (insert set text here) and this is how you should answer the following categories of questions...."

Trevor Nunn clearly did not answer the question "Hamlet avenges his mother rather than his father: how far and in what ways do you agree?"

I suspect that the answer, "No distance at all: none", would not get you an A* grade.


There's a Radio Four programme on this tomorrow (Monday) morning at 11am. I really do hope that they broadcast more of this tosh from the teacher who wants to make the useless pupils feel good about themselves. "Yes, you followed the assessment objectives! Well done! You really understand Hamlet!" Wouldn't it be better to make pupils only feel confident with justification? Otherwise, they are going to be in for a horrible shock when they encounter the real world.

+++++++++++++

The world is heading back into one of its phases of false optimism, backed by most of the columnists in the FT and the Sunday Times, as far as I can see. This is despite the US accepting that it's going to have to launch a non-boat QE2, and the Governor of the Bank of England is trying to explain how things are fine, even though we currently have negative real interest rates (-2.5%) and we haven't even yet seen the impact of the cutbacks to come.

And, most worryingly, we have the scenario that many of us could have predicted, but none of us really wanted -- that being that Germany is exporting its way out of trouble; the German consumer is not consuming any more, and the structural imbalances of the global economy are getting worse rather than better. Meanwhile, no-one mentions the Chinese housing market, or indeed the Chinese bubble, at all.

I think that part of the reason for this is that we are, quite simply, in completely unknown territory. Economists attempt, like chartists, to throw a map of events from the past (1930s, early 1970s Japan in the early 1990s) onto the current scenario and work from there. But, clearly, we are in a very different world today. It's far more interlinked, and there are two significant players (China, India) who didn't really count even as recently as 1991. If you take the "it could fall either way" line, and add to that a large number of variables, many of which we can't measure accurately and, even if we could, of which we wouldn't really understand the relative importance even if we could measure them accurately, then you can see why we are in a classic scenario of no economist in the world being clear in their own mind about how it's all going to pan out.

Perhaps one helpful methodology would be to see how things are different.

Working against the 1970s stagflation theory is, I think, one powerful force -- the labour market is much less unionised. Labour, as it were, has lots much of its pricing power.

Also working against that theory for the moment is that quantitative easing is not having a noticeable effect on M4 -- a broad money measure that no-one has taken much notice of for years. At the moment it's expanding in the US and UK by about 3%. I have long held a theory that the great flaw in Friendmanesque monetarism was that restricting M0 was pointless because it had no impact on the "real" volatility or supply of money. Now it appears that the opposite is, at least in the short term, also the case. You can send M0, M1 and possibly even M2 (if I could remember what it was) through the roof, without making a blind bit of difference to the supply of money that matters.

The reason, as I wrote before, is that people are taking all of this money and (like me) are paying down debt with it. This might not be the best 10-year move, but it sure as hell is the best two-year move, and that seems to be the general maximum personal spending time horizon. If it makes P Birks Inc short of capital three years down the line, then, well, I've shown that my credit is good, and I'll probably be able to borrow it back.

Low interest rates, in this sense, aren't stimulating the economy at all. There's nowhere to put my money efficiently, except to pay down my old fixed-rate debt. The increase in the proportion of fixed rates and inflation-index deposits/borrowing have served to decrease the impact of pumping money into the economy. (I'll admit that there's a slight hole in this argument in that variable rates are themseloves something of a newcomer to finance -- so cutting rates and pumping money into the economy in the 1930s should have had a similar "pay down debt" effect. But it didn't. I'll have to have a think about that one.)

Working against the 1930s Keynesian stimulus is, I think, a lack of government "slack". basically the opportunity for the government to spend masses of money to stimulate the economy (at least in the UK) is busted by (a) the danger of the UK losing its AAA rating if it borrows any more so to do and (b) half of the country has become an effective state economy already. Northern Ireland and many parts of the north-east of England have been kept from becoming ghost towns or lands of anarchy only by decades of the state pumping in money. Thirty years of Keynesian stimulus has merely kept the status quo.

What works against the 1990s Japan argument? Well, the most important, I think, is that Japan's "fight" against deflation was nothing but. While the Japanese Treasury was doing one thing, the Bank of Japan was doing another. Every time one side pushed the expansionary button, the other choked off the recovery.

In other words, if we carry on with the current stimulus without the ECB choking off the recovery at the pass, we're going to head into a very strange situation indeed. The macro-economics of it in Europe would appear to back the Aardvark argument. If Germany manages a massive expansion (because Greece and Spain are so weak that the euro stays soft, thus helping German exports to the US, Japan, and China) while Spain stays stagnant and greece contracts, it really gets harder to see the euro surviving more than five years. The worry is (see above) that the ECB will "solve" this problem (the threat of the eurozone disintegrating) by choking off German expansion rather than encouraging Greece and Spain to get their act together.


The current situation looks likely to me to lead to some kind of odd "permanent crisis", with tactical moves being made every year to attempt to solve the latest mess. This situation could, I suppose, last a long time. No grand vision, but lots of white-coated little men with little imagination running around trying to stop the latest leak in the dyke. While that isn't an ideal scenario, I suppose that, if it stops the dyke collapsing until after I am dead, it is at least the best that I can hope for.


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Comments

[simonbillenness.livejournal.com]

Here's a question for you to take under exam conditions.

Does labeling the bulk of school students as "useless pupils" mark you as a cantankerous and elitist old misanthrope?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

No.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

An even shorter answer than the hypothetical answer posited in the main text! However, I would point out that this in no way marks me as being prejudiced against those who are cantankerous, elitist, old, or misanthropic.

PJ

[simonbillenness.livejournal.com]

Show your work. Grade: D.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

It was a lawyerly question, so therefore I am not in anyway obliged to "show my work". Secondly, I deny your competence to grade.

PJ

[(Anonymous)]

Since I have been a lawyer and this is not a court of law, your characterization of my question is incorrect. Deduct two further marks.

[ceemage.livejournal.com]

Where does Pete label the bulk of school students as "useless pupils"? All he says is that "useless pupils benefit from the current regime." At no point does he state what he thinks the proportions of useless vs non-useless pupils is, or (just as importantly) imply that he thinks this ratio has moved (in either direction) over time.

/Not a lawyer

/Good at those "has x been explicitly stated in this passage?" they lob into those management tests

[simonbillenness.livejournal.com]

Good point. Rereading Birks' piece, it is not clear whether he thinks the "talented" pupils are more or less numerous than the "useless" pupils.

What really stuck in my craw was Birks' labeling a group of pupils as "useless." I'm all in favor of exams that recognize talent, flair, and imagination. I would suggest that the pupils that Birks labels as "useless" are generally quite capable. They are just as poorly served as the talented by a system that gives unearned reassurance instead of actual teaching. Putting a pejorative label on them struck me as lazily blaming the victim.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're completely missing Peter's point, he's not labelling any group of pupils, nor is he lazily blaming pupils. His point is very clear, and I couldn't agree more. I live in Ireland, and I see the same issues here in our education system.
Kevin

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Simon, you read want you want to read and see what you want to see, hence your earlier use of the word "bulk" (in the sense of the word "majority"). You "saw" the meaning "majority", even though I didn't use it.

More importantly, you "saw" me labelling a group of pupils as "useless" as a character trait. I hadn't intended that. What I meant was pupils useless in that subject.

I was useless at Physics. I was useless at Chemistry, and, even though I pushed through to a (failed) pair of O levels in them, I was useless at Geography and at Biology. I wasn't (and didn't consider myself) a "victim".

(It seems to me that you are carrying a lifetime of guilt because you were born into what you consider to be a "privileged" lifestyle. But maybe I'm misinterpreting. But I'm afraid I don't feel that I owe anyone anything for having been lucky as to where and when I was born. I'm neither resentful of those luckier than me at birth, nor sorry for those unluckier.)

But I showed flair at some parts of Maths and some parts of English. Teachers have only so much time. They have to focus somewhere. Far better, I feel, to have a different system from the one that that teacher above describes. I would have wanted to be encouraged in English and Maths, rather than made to feel good about myself in the subjects where I was bad.

But either you focus on the talented or you focus on the untalented. You can't (by definition) give "above average" focus to the talent, but "no less than average" focus to the untalented (or vice-versa). And if your solution to that is just "throw more money at it, your problem of relative focus remains unchanged. To spread everything evenly strikes me as inefficient and a strategy that most pupils would think idiotic.

All I was doing was "translating" into a deliberately blunt version that teacher's words of politically correct crap. I wasn't writing a policy paper. I was writing a blog -- a thousand words or so, very quickly. Hell, I might have phrased it better, but it was 1000 or so words. You managed to leave out a "not" in just two sentences, so you can see how difficult it is to avoid saying the opposite of what you mean, let alone something that can be interpreted in one of two ways.

Your question was "lawyerly" because it used value-loaded words -- a typical lawyerly (and political) trick. Possibly this was deliberate because you thought my word was value-loaded, whereas in fact my word was a statement of function. ("I am useless at the high jump, but that does not make me useless"). Of the four words you used, all may be true, but three of them were not in any way "marked" by the sentence. The one where there could be a "mark" was the word "elitist". But this word can be used in a number of ways, and lawyers (and politicians) like to blur one into the other, so merely the use of the word is an insult, with just as much a negative connotation as "a useless person". In the sense that you appeared to me to use it, I would deny the allegation. But I am definitely misanthropic. Humanity sucks and the sooner we wipe outselves off the planet, the better it will be for the planet and all of the other animals on it. Humanity can't solve the problem. Humanity IS the problem.

But to things that matter

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Why didn't anyone want to comment on the bit that mattered -- Germany's response to the economic crisis? Education is, relatively, rather boring, I feel.

PJ

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

Your point about the interest rate echoes something I was saying the other day. The low interest rate encourages further borrowing and does not reward saving, which is not a good thing in the long term. The banks are still in a situation where the money supply is an issue - the old days where they funded borrowing from other savings are long gone and even with people having been given a short, sharp shock to remind them that borrowing without saving is not necessarily a good idea, I don't see behaviours changing. As you say, many people are paying down their debt, but they are nto saving money, no-one's refilling the empty reservoirs, and that sadly betokens further problems elsewhere down the line.

If all goes well and we sell the UK house we'll be cash-rich for the first time in, oh, ever. And I don't know what to do with that cash because the old intermediate option (broadly avaiable cash that still earns some interest) just isn't there any more. You can either have it available and watch it dwindle in value, in effect (even at low inflatino rates), or you can go for growth investment but either at a significant risk or in ways that basically remove your capital from actually being available to you.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

The problem that you might be facing in the near future is one of the reasons that stockmarkets have performed so well in the past couple of years, despite evidence thhat earnings are likely to be flat/falling for a good few years. Equities are still paying dividends, and it's broadly available cash. If there's an equities panic, then we really are all in the shit.

PJ

The Aardvark Argument

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

In defence of said argument, lawyerly or otherwise, I should like to point out to the Court that the idea of the ECB '"solv[ing]" this problem (the threat of the eurozone disintegrating) by choking off German expansion' is patent nonsense. Passing by the defendant's inadequate periphrasis, whereby he should have indicated a desire to 'solve this "problem"' rather than the reverse, I submit that there is no goddamn chance of this happening whatsoever.

How, pray, would the ECB go about doing this?

The caesuras in a historical timeline do not, perhaps sadly, occur through the efforts of "lots of white-coated little men with little imagination running around." To return to your lead, I suspect I would merely get a B in History A-Level these days, but the one thing that I believe that particular degree has taught me is that catastrophic things happen out of the blue and are embraced by a small number of individuals with their hands on the levers of power at the time, most of whom don't have a clue what the consequences are and don't really care in any case.

Or, to put it in simple terms, the chances of the French (de facto financial bureaucrats of the ECB and much of the rest of the EU) telling the Germans (aka paymasters) to do something so obviously absurd are zilch.

2014, I'm telling you.

Re: The Aardvark Argument

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing about Germany is that we might actually reach a Japan-like situation, with one internal faction fighting to sustain the export-driven recovery, while the other internal faction is looking to choke off inflation. In that sense, there will be a force within Germany backing any ECB moves to keep the eurozone more stable, while another force (currently the predominant one) will be going for the low-interest rate weak euro-driven recovery.

PJ

Re: The Aardvark Argument

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, you're either brilliant or totally deluded.

I sincerely hope you're ... er ... what was the question again? ... Actually, it doesn't help the rest of the EU (+UK) either way. But you're right. If there's anything to be learned from the Japan (Goodies For Free vs Central Bank) example in the 90s, we're just about there.

And here I wish to point out that Japan was a unitary country in 1990, and the EU, no matter what it says, is not. Japan has managed something like 20 years of piddling pain by distributing it around prefectures.

Not really a possibility for the EU, I feel.

[(Anonymous)]

I was only this morning wondering why nobody mentions the money supply figures any more nowadays.

I am also paying off all my debt, sadly this includes my absurdly (< 1%) low interest rate tracker mortgage as I am moving house and for various complex reasons doing it as a 100% cash purchase.

Matt Harrison

[simonbillenness.livejournal.com]

Matt's example point to another structural change - and problem - with the global economy. To wit, Americans - the consumers of last resort - have hit the wall with their over-spending and under-saving. The evidence in the States is that American consumers are hunkering down by spending less and paying down debt.

How the world economy adapts will be interesting. Will it be through an offsetting increase in BRIC countries' consumer spending? Do we shift to a more sustainable lower-material/energy consumption system?

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

To repeat Mr Birks:

No. And No.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the American consumer will rear his head again before too long. Consumption in the BRICs will rise as well, in a manner that will far outweigh any efforts in the west to reduce global pollution. Basically, they have seen the American way of life, and they want it. They want cars, they want colour TVs. And for us (who have had them) to say "ahhh, but you can't have them; global warming, and all that" when our major contribution appears to be to trade down to a Prius from a Hummer, all seems a bit, well, selfish. In that sense, it might be admirable to aim for "sustainability", but it's also admirable to aim for world peace. Neither, I fear, are remotely likely to happen. Mainly because there are a lot of bad guys in the world, and many of them are not in the first world.

[(Anonymous)]

Absent economic growth accompanied by income growth, say, the bottom 80% of income earners, the American consumer won't come back like before. American consumption since the mid-1970s was fueled by borrowing, ultimately from China, to make up for stagnant wage growth. If the States suffers a double-dip recession, consumers won't feel confident enough to borrow.

Absent further recession, I would agree that American consumers will come back a bit. But I don't see them any more being the world consumers of last resort.

In the BRICs, the challenge for the U.S. and Europe will be to transfer - preferably sell - as much clean power and green technology as possible to make the economic growth in the BRICs have as little environmental and carbon impact as possible. There are leaders in those countries who understand that, if they don't invest clean technology now, they will have to spend much more money later adapting to the temperature increase and greater climate variability. Of course, like in the west, they have their own fossil fuel counter-lobby that will try to block investments in low-carbon. How this plays out lies the future of the planet and our species. So no pressure there.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

One of the few good things about my disastrous decision to take a fixed-rate mortgage when I bought the flat downstairs is that at least I have an "investment" option that pays 5.89% tax-free.

Nice to hear that you are finally moving away from upstairs flatdom, Matt, unless, of course, you have moved away already, and are now moving again. In which case, congratulations again.

PJ

Elitists, as in fucking talented

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

And just to join your leader with your trailer, here are the relevant "Not Only ... But Also" links:

Ode To Joy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaJj293AKJQ&feature=related)

and, from the Lost Tapes of Sir Arthur Streep-Greebling,

the definitive final act of Othello (http://www.videosurf.com/video/dudley-moore-peter-cook-the-lost-tapes-housekeeper-83312115).

I suspect that either writing one's essay in greek (as in the subtitles) or polari (as in Dud) would lose you that all-important glowing little star, sweetie. Bona, bona! Now, where did I put those rubber gloves?

But who cares?

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I can't even comment on current A-Levels in Maths or Science (or indeed History or Greek).

Perhaps, as a general observation, the thing that really worries me about this (and I wish to point out that we are talking here about A-Levels, not O-Levels or GSCEs or Baccalaureates), occurs at 15:10 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00td743/How_to_Get_An_AStar/), where Martin Bloxwich (sp?) says:

"I think ... an examiners job has changed in a quite fundamental way, at A-Level. I have to get a little bit technical, but in the days when I used to examine, we operated what was called a 'norm-referenced system'.

"That meant that, in any particular year, a given percentage of pupils would score particular grades.

"We now have a system which is called a criterion referenced system, which says that in order for example to get an A grade, you must be able to do this and this and this. And these criteria are laid down, and understood, by both teachers and pupils."

You, me, everybody on this blog, we don't matter at this point. Who the hell would want to waste their time teaching under these circumstances? And even worse, who the hell would want to waste their time getting an education?