Avoiding GOM status
Aug. 15th, 2010 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksI 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:
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.
+++++++++++
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.
+++++++++++
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 04:17 pm (UTC)Does labeling the bulk of school students as "useless pupils" mark you as a cantankerous and elitist old misanthrope?
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 05:24 pm (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 06:09 pm (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 06:35 pm (UTC)To your specific points:
The "this is not a court of law" point is irrelevant. A question does not have to be put in a court of law for it to be "lawyerly".
Secondly, your point about "having been a lawyer" is irrelevant as well. It doesn't make you more competent to judge what is or is not "lawyerly". It could be argued that it makes you less competent.
Therefore your use of the word "since" is inaccurate use of English, because it states that "A" leads to "B". You did you not show that "A" leads to "B". In fact I would contend either zero or negative correlation. Lawyers might actually be less able to judge what is lawyerly and non-lawyers.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 08:40 pm (UTC)/Not a lawyer
/Good at those "has x been explicitly stated in this passage?" they lob into those management tests
no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 09:37 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-16 12:32 pm (UTC)Kevin
But to things that matter
Date: 2010-08-16 03:21 pm (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-08-16 03:28 pm (UTC)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.
Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 04:04 pm (UTC)"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"
Vacuous thought. No danger. Why slightly? Define eccentric. Flair bad. Catering from Heathrow. Ludicrously false assumption. False dichotomy (flair vs non flair), devised simply to support "argument." Failure of proof ("greatly benefit"). Support of questionable status quo ("assessment objectives"). Wholly unsupported inference ("because they are signposts that give them confidence.")
Fucking offensive.
I've taken the care to save this one, because the last one was rejected by Live Journal on the grounds that you had deleted your post. (Presumably on the grounds that we both like Billenness and you thought you went over the top. Well, possibly, but hell, I'm more offensive than that in 50% of cases.)
OK, you want a response? Germany self-absorbed to self-damaging levels. No news there. Interesting consequence of Euro Union (currency dragged down by countries that can't make use of that fact). Supposed virtues of internal free market (no tariffs, so work goes to the little countries) shown to be bollocks. Euro dead by -- I forget my prediction, but I'll stick with it -- 2014?
Ballet short story Vonnegut. Thought was Ellison or Pohl/Kornbluth. Have found site. Site this (http://www.whatsthatbook.com/).
Hope happy and content.
YerLuvin Auntie Mavis Aardvark.
Re: Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 04:10 pm (UTC)Mid-B on Journalism A-Level, I fear, young Peter.
Re: Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 04:27 pm (UTC)This "uncharted territory" stuff is perhaps the most worrying thing. It's all right to sail into "uncharted territory" if you're Christopher Columbus, and you admit that you're clueless. The big problem here is that everybody concerned thinks they have a reliable map. Even if they can't agree on the projection.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-16 04:54 pm (UTC)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.
Re: But to things that matter
Date: 2010-08-16 05:29 pm (UTC)Now, I know part of this is the accent. Absent a balaclava and a mauser, the Northern Irish accent is one of the most charming in the world. Most of it, however, lies in the hedging. It's almost like he's being held to ransom by the educational authorities in a show trial -- which, given that I assume Ofsted has power over Northern Ireland, is probably the case.
In fact, the contrast between what he said, and what the Sunday Times reported, would make an interesting English A-Level question in and of itself.
The frightening bit comes a lot earlier. Apparently there are five, yes five, "asssessment objectives," and they're labelled from (if I recall) AO1 through AO5. And these labels are attached to each question in the exam.
I may have mis-heard that. I hope I did. It's hard enough answering an exam question in 3/4 of an hour, without having to juggle the precise forms of political correctness involved.
Jesus.
The Aardvark Argument
Date: 2010-08-16 05:54 pm (UTC)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: Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 06:00 pm (UTC)PJ
Re: Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 06:04 pm (UTC)I can't disagree with you too much on 1970s. It's all a tough call. Yep, the oil crisis was inflationary, no doubt, but unionisation helped pull wages up behind it. And these were times of mass employers in the manufacturing industry, hence a greater proportion of "mass" action/
PJ
Re: Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 06:19 pm (UTC)This is the point where you say something like "Well, that's internet technology for you."
And I'd say "No it's not. It has nothing to do with either the internet or technology."
And you'd say "It happens all the time. Remember that MAC issue with the router?"
And I'd say "There are more things in bitz and tubez, Birks, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
And you'd say "I suppose you think that's fackin' clever, mate. Well, let me tell you, it totally ignores AO3."
And I'd say "Look, I program these things. Only a particularly demented sort of blog software would entirely throw a comment away, simply because the back-link disappeared."
And you'd say "What has that got to do with Hamlet?"
And I'd say "Your Mother!"
Perhaps this novel update of the traditional textual interpretation in English Literature A-Levels may yet prove of value. I shall recommend it to the gentlemen at Live Journal.
Re: Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 06:25 pm (UTC)If you look at the FoxConn operation, it's massive beyond Stalinist dreams (with the possible exception of T34 production in 1944). There's no obvious reason not to see that as the upcoming norm in the BRICs.
If you look at, and I'm just going to call them "productive" rather than "manufacturing," activities in the G7, the model appears to be the Mittelstand. There's a definite difference on how these two industrial models would be affected by monetary policy.
I'll have to think about that one.
Re: Anti Matter
Date: 2010-08-16 06:38 pm (UTC)I take your main point in Act II Para 4 to be that almost everybody involved, be they politicians or economists or journalists or Rosencranz or Guildenstern, are making judgements on a "best fit" theory. I think it was Krugman (though it might not have been) who opined on Sunday that "I've seen this before -- in Japan."
Well, yes, Paul, you did indeed see it. And, indeed, some of it might be relevant. How much? Well, you might have to think about that one. Quite hard.
I think it's fair to compare the present situation to the Great Depression, if only because we don't have anything else remotely comparable.
To draw conclusions based upon the analysis of a pre-WWII economy is, however, faintly preposterous.
In other words, on an individual basis, it pays well. At the level of society, it's a crap shoot.