Europe needs desperately to fix education

This country, as with most of the continent, is facing a multiple and growing crisis. Unemployment, fiscal collapse, monetary incontinence and low relative productivity are going to work through our system alongside a grotesque lack of credit in a highly destructive way. We lack the savings and resources to see us through.

Britain is about to have a crisis in graduate education. A country which lacks its own plumbers and electricians and which has become top-heavy in financial and service industries is about to find itself without the flexible wherewithal to retrain people. The graduates and school-leavers and homeowners who will be thus failed will join the pressurised, and the indebted, and the repossessed. Some will struggle through; some will have a terrible time.

Many of the universities to which they went will have an awful time too. Many are technically insolvent, or near it, and unsure of what they should be.

Why not square the circle? Take the insolvent universities, merge them into flexible, modular, local campuses of a national university with a national credit system and a ten-year limit on the time it takes to get a degree, and let the Open University run it.

The National University could teach people real things in real time at their own pace. Meanwhile the big academic places could be floated away on their own property and endowments, and we could turn our attention to freeing the sixth forms for any model parents would trust their vouchers with whilst freeing education at the secondary and primary level.

Yet, how likely is any of that to happen? I tell you this--if it doesn't, if we neglect maths, and basic languages, and science, and proper intellectual discipline much longer, there won't be any point in viewing the education system as anything more than a holding pen for penury. That would be a tragedy, and would seal both the decline of Europe and of this country.

I hope that it never happens, but I fear that it is.

Brian Meenagh

My father died twenty three years ago, at around one on the fifteenth of July. He was thirty nine. He was on a golf course, with my brother. I have spent the day teaching in Merton, and at various champagne receptions and high table. Beneath a tree in the gardens, near the wall, I smoked a cigar--an honduran negra--and twirled some bourbon around a glass, thinking of a day which I remember as yesterday, and of a man who died, under a name assumed in Northern Ireland, on the hottest day of a summer long ago.

Not a day passes when I fail to think of him, nor one where I fail to pray for him. This evening, on a path Duns Scotus may have trod, I poured a little Jack Daniels onto the gravel, thinking of Yeats' poem of Christ Church ghosts;

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
And may a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls’ Night,
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost’s right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

May my father rest in peace.

Why it will take a lot to lose the republic....

Just have a listen to this charming, inspirational and open speech. I found it whilst writing up some things, and had Arnold in the background talking all over the place in Winnie-the-Pooh discursions and biting chunks out of life.

He's just burbling away to a group of people at California State University about education and freedom, and, well, what a smart, driven man he is. That chap is a force of nature. Some of those kids in the audience must have had subsequent tough times lightened by the talk.

Unfortunately, Californians have spent years at every level doing their level best to ruin the golden state, and the republic is suffering too. Many of Governor Schwarzenegger's aspirations from two years ago have been severely compromised. The fact that America can contain men like him, though, suggests that not all is yet lost.

I do like this speech.

Monday Morning Spot the Difference

Here's a CIA document released under the US Freedom of Information Act from February 1983. It is entitled 'USSR : Hints of Prolonged Stay in Afghanistan. Apparently, Nazi-style insurgents required a security effort which would have to be sold on the basis of Soviet patriotism.

Here's a website concerned with the first Anglo-Afghan War; the second; the third; and a modern journalist who appears to think that the fourth is winnable, or at least who did in 2003.

(Here, by way of aside, is the late Mr Harold Macmillan in 1955 refusing to touch the Afghan border with a barge pole).

Madness; to keep doing the same thing over and over again thinking that it will improve. Eternal recurrence; the Nietzschean hell that exists when faith and hope are disallowed by the momentary prisons of our concerns.

Go on. Spot the difference.

Sometimes, a little light does fall in.

The picture is Raphael, Justice, on the Stanza Della Segnatura ceiling.

I keep encountering people who are being consumed by the recession, and despite the fact that my present circumstances are quite pleasant--I've just returned from a nice meal and a chat over a cigar on Merton college wall--I can't help but feel bad for people.

I don't like gloom. Things aren't all about me, of course, and each time I pointed out what was going on over the past two or thee years, I did try and suggest some partial solution, or at least that it was not beyond the wit of people to see the peculiar set of circumstances confronting this culture. I wish that all was happy in the garden; but around us, the cold is closing in.

Still, there is a certain pleasure in seeing that those previously insulated are beginning to feel the heat of a little scrutiny, in some place far removed. The scandal that Christopher Booker has been drawing attention to--of the grotesque mis-spending and the poverty and inadequacy of equipment with which British troops are being sent to Afghanistan is beginning to come to light. Let it roll on!

A good few months ago, too, I noted an odd aside by Seymour Hersh--usually a CIA conduit, or at least, that's what I'd assumed--to the effect that Dick Cheney had been running a gang of killers at some arms-length remove.

I now notice that names are being leaked, though since Leon Panetta is doing it, I'd caution readers. What's in public is a shot across bows, not a Thomas More-style revelation. The first thing I'd do if I were the CIA and guilty of this sort of thing would be to get some lurid inflated story out so that its collapse could taint the eventual truth; the second would be to start a hare running that would lead past me to the military or some deniable operation, and the third would be to paralyse Dick Cheney.

Still, its good to see them sweat. And, before you take me to task as some sort of nut, I've met people who've killed for their country and they seem to me to be some of the most maimed individuals whom I have ever encountered. The condition of their souls terrified me, frankly.

Thirdly, I notice the ongoing inplosion of the global warming arguments. I do think that peak oil, energy dependence, and vast, bloated governments looking for tax and for drama are a bad thing, so the collapse of this particular delusion, which has attracted so many lies to its side, is something I can't say I look on with equanimity. If Kim Jong Il dies soon and we are all immolated by some set of atomic and economic dominoes, at least we can go knowing that, at the end, not everyone fell for the nonsense.

And, finally, a beautiful encyclical from Pope Benedict, with a curious practical riff on global governance added to the usual christian democratic distrust of untrammelled markets, or rather of markets alienated from human relationships, is making me think. All this on a night when I got to attend a great Vespers service, and see old friends, in whatever straitened circumstances.

I'm lucky in my friends. These past two weekends, I've found that one set are off to St Petersburg, another is to Syria, and a third is probably in Israel. I wish them all well, should they be reading. And, if as you read, you feel the waters lapping at your feet, there is at least the comfort, if you are honest, that dishonest people are worried tonight too. Justice may not be an abstract thing, and it could be true, as Confucius said--the good in heart will be forever free of evil, whereas those who give in to the dark will be forever in fear.

How American healthcare works....

And no, I am not an expert. But I've just talked with one. Physicians charge what they want; insurance companies tell them what they will get. The difference between the two is in some states recycled as write-offs. The money not taxed is then spent on insurance against lawyers and lawsuits, many of whom are burdened by debts.

To stop this, some states are instituting tribunals that are presented as alternatives to court, but with a constitutional appeal to a court if necessary. The lawyers do not like this. Nor do the insurers. States side with the lawyers, and in addition give tax breaks to tort rewards paid out by the insurers, who need the threat of them to get business but who need them to be rarely successful, so as to make money.

Pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, charge physicians whatever they like for drugs that have been around for years and which could be generic. They then lobby Washington, and get the federal preference for 'bundled' prescription drug options undermined so that demand power cannot be used to control prices. States support them in this effort, because by taking on medical responsibilities they attract companies to the states, but pass off the burden of paying for them onto borrowing or federal subsidy. They justify this by reference to the tax returns from companies in the state.

Individuals mostly hate the insurance bureaucracy. They do not understand the pharmaceutical companies, which buy their details from the data companies handling doctors' computers and suggest more expensive drugs to them if their physician doesn't prescribe the more lucrative ones. Individuals also dislike the state governments intensely and think of Washington as remote, but are open enough to the idea of a differently socialised system of medicine--because the present one is a matter of social choice and subsidy--that the industry is reasonably scared right now.

Immigrants pay into the system but get little out, and social security failures are used as reasons not to have health provision. The American system therefore costs everyone and delivers at a higher price than it could, but often on time and with the reassurance of a high quality of treatment. Doctors work long hours with high debts.

Why on earth would anyone plough into this mess and expect an easy solution?

Is there any sense in trying to regulate financial markets?

There is a premium in blaming financiers for the crisis in which the west faces itself. They're a comfortable target, and most people have a sense of the arrogance or personal destructiveness of the industry. Things that are arcane, or which are in essence ephemera, such as derivative markets, credit-default swaps, and market-to-market pricing are little understood, and easily transferred to metaphors of fraud and villainy.

As I write, the political establishments of Britain, Europe and America are rushing to institute new regulations for financial markets. They suggest that this action--which looks remarkably like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted--is in fact sensible, because the way in which 'markets' behaved in the past is a key to the present and the future.

Markets don't exist. Relationships exist, some of which are best left to the clear if hard rules of the deep private sector, some of which result in things that can only be made just by collective discipline. So, for instance, I'm a person who thinks that utilities, and transport infrastructure, may well be better run by authorities dedicated to the common good, and in equity should be if public money is to be spent on them.

However, I can't see how regulating financial markets makes any sense. Let's say that 'volatility' was repressed by mechanisms that made it harder for prices to react to changes in commodity stocks, external events, or risk. What would happen? Value would be displaced in a manner akin to pressure, and we'd have bigger booms and busts in the future. In addition, individuals and funds might be encouraged into complacency or panic, and unable to find cushions for their intermittent crises in the points and times between trades where derivative markets and the insurance industry reside. There may ultimately be less money around.

The truth, of course, is that there isn't an overwhelming demand for the regulation of markets per se. There is an overwhelming need for politicians guilty of stoking or not stopping a bubble which citizens powered to create psychological security and validation by doing something. This is important, in itself, since economics is as much psychology as anything else; but it is not the reason presented for change. The media are too stupid to grasp the point, but I think the financiers probably do.

There is also, behind the scenes, a powerplay going on. The Obama administration knows it is desperate for cash and to stop tax evasion, and thinks that money is available in banks; the Europeans are determined to reign in the city of London; many in Europe want the financial industry to go down and take its cosmopolitan but radical values with it; and the Chinese are desperate to create a stable skein of lending on which to move their vast food machine, only ever 14 days away from famine, over the economic ravine.

Nobody--absolutely nobody--in power is acknowledging that oil at viable prices is either available or attracting investment. The truth is, the oil is running out. Food is vulnerable to the gathering cold, as we enter global cooling. Rubbish about regulating markets is diverting, but unsatisfactory.

Financial types are prone to viewing their sector as a jungle. Yet they are able to take advantage of employment laws, tax loopholes, cosy relationships with government, and clever young people who will find ways to make regulation work for them. They will always be alright--so long as their 'jungle' keeps the animal forces in pens. Why not lift the fences?

What I worry about is, especially in a European market that lacks the depth or savvy of the American one, that people and dwindling pension funds might actually be fooled by regulations into thinking that they are safer in markets.

Perhaps, if financial industries want to live in a jungle, we should as a society allow them to do so. Whilst they scream, we in the clearings could concentrate on credit unions, mutual funds, proper railways and power, and the recovery of ourselves. Every time they came out of the trees and wanted our services, we could tax, charge and ignore them, chucking only steak and cocaine in occasionally.

Just a thought.

That 1930 Feeling

Right, we're less than a year into the great recession and already some of the more excitable people in the press and business are declaring victory even if mad Jose/Marcus Aurelius Biden isn't. Consumers and homeowners too, divorced from their government and from the time to acquaint themselves with economic reality--because they are trying to pay off debt or keep a job or a roof over their heads--are behaving with a certain grim determination.

People may be in the well, but there's a magnificence to the way they're gripping the bricks and trying to haul themselves out regardless of the political and media class. That group, equally, seems to have convinced itself in the English speaking world that misdirected efforts against skilled immigrants and some sort of weird psuedo-Buddhist mega-debt are the way forward.

But they aren't. I do wonder if the worst is not yet to come. For instance, any economics teacher worth their salt will tell students that unemployment is a lagged indicator. It goes up long after the conditions that created it go away. In some states, it brings with it a rapid fall in unemployment insurance, and then leaves people literally with no means to buy food or to house themselves. There have been tent cities in Japan for some time, though they seem to relocated quickly when they appear. A good few states in the US have followed. Could they arrive in western Europe, outside of natural disaster zones like Aquila?

In those states which do offer unemployment benefit, tax revenues are collapsing. Since the past fifteen years or so have seen governments encouraged to develop huge hidden, rolled-on debt with privatisation schemes that socialised the money owed and diverted profit away from taxpayers, governments have no real way of meeting their obligations.

It may be that we see a new form of inflation, in which value is reasserted not by the spiralling downwards of money values but by the restriction of most people's ability to buy anything. I write 'new'; I should write 'relatively novel', since that's been a definition of poverty forever.

The unemployment current is running headlong into another one, which again we've known about for years but manipulated on the credit markets. That's the pensions problem. Access to generous state pensions is now something even part-time Judges, or some of them, are being encouraged to strike for. As the BBC is discovering in this country, though, and as public workers everywhere will soon discover, these things cannot be afforded. Something will have to give, and it won't be the taxpayer.

Perhaps they can keep warm burning old copies of the London Times that proclaimed 'there is no pensions crisis'. There are enough of them unsold to allow people to save money by doing so.

Taxpayers anyway are not spending. They and business are caught in a situation not of profit maximisation but of debt minimisation. Their monies are going out to banks and institutions themselves desperate for cash. I've noticed the trend, for instance, of privatised power utilities giving themselves loans by raising the minimum payment they want each month, or 'trying it on' with speculative assessed bills that often turn out to be far higher than a meter reading would justify. If people don't or can't spend, and yet oil keeps going up, the Chinese and for that matter Iranian economies will not work. Putting out commodities or finished goods alike whilst paying for your own investments will become extremely problematic.

This is an equal-opportunity recession. The same things that are driving those in fear of not paying the mortgage this morning are pressurising governments.

Sooner or later, something will give. Governments can be illegitimate or irritants during a boom. People detach themselves when the money is good. Yet the combination of unemployment, energy prices, commodity shortages, and food problems are going soon to meet with fiscal unsustainability everywhere.

Life's a film not a polaroid; things can change. One of the problems for those who pronounce on these things is that events can be anticipated or changed by action. This summer morning, however, I do feel as though we're all on the edge of something a lot harder than most have been prepared for. Like those who must have seen through the nonsense in 1930, I wonder where it is all going to lead. When is the great recession going to become a permanent cultural adjustment?

Sarah Palin, 1962

In 1962, Richard Nixon lost the California Gubernatorial campaign. His career looked in pieces; the press had run a typically tough race against him that he interpreted, sensitive as he was, as vicious. He declared the result the end of his last ever campaign, and stalked away in ill-advised public disgust.

Immediately, Nixon began planning a comeback. All those bad things about the thirty-seventh president were always accompanied by things one could admire. The soaring grasp of foreign policy, the determination to understand the currents of American life, the frustrated orthodoxy of a mid-twentieth century man, all these things were there that night. Nixon was more than his caricature.

Last Friday, watching the--what is the word? Self-defenestration? autoimmolation? of Sarah Palin, I wondered at what America had lost. There's a story about Nixon and, I think, Len Garment climbing over a wall in the fifties and sleeping in a Summer House together rather than being seen entering a hotel late at night. Before they slept, Nixon seems to have told Garment all about his ambitions--about what he would put up with to win a prize with which he thought he would do some good. He thought that, however twisted you think him. What is it that Palin thought she was doing when she walked away from fourteen months of her job in Alaska?

Palin is often touted as a standard American mom. Well, I know such women. Do they convince themselves without any preparation that they can put themselves in front of the people, demonise opponents, routinely lie, and then walk away from jobs? Do they look to any sort of base? Do they live in some gossip-girl version of populist politics in which every decision must be lowbrow and uniformed, proudly?

I had some time for Mrs Palin in the campaign last year. Her sub-Edna Everage performace of recent months has made me think that the United States had a lucky escape. And yet--this is a characteristic throughout the west--people are now so alienated from their governments in what are supposedly democracies, but which are actually servile states, that many good people were prepared to support her.

We are all over-regulated, over-governed, and lied to by social institutions like governments, banks, schools and companies. It's OK to blame the market for it--I understand--or to blame Government--I understand that too. The rot, however, comes from culture. It comes from not thinking, not resisting, from simply following things without thinking through. The west is now manipulated by oligarchies and by a mentality, latterly but not instantly funded by credit, associated formerly with elites that is narcissistic, narcoleptic, and destructive. Culture, the way we think of the world, is what is corrupted.

In such situations, especially where those who understand or who can see what is happening politically or economically, simply repeat the mantras of consensus or keep their heads down, people like Mrs Palin attract support. They attract good people. She herself probably thinks that she is doing good, and being an ordinary citizen who has had a raw deal, and frankly, I can see the point because there are many who are lauded who are personally worse than her.

Tonight though, I look at her and I can see who she is--a spokesperson for the lower instincts of the discontented who think that they are independent because they are disgusted by the hypocrisies and badness of the things they might otherwise place trust in. I think less of her for her not trying to lead people away from this; less of her for walking away. Lloyd Bentsen once dismissed Dan Quayle as no John Kennedy; all I can say is that Mrs Palin is no Richard Nixon.

UPDATE: Conservative Cabbie has taken me to task over on his (very civil) blog, and I've tried to respond in the comments to his straightforward concerns. CC is a Palin fan. I like his blog, and especially the courtesy and curiousity on it, but if you are a Palin fan you may like what he has to say in response to this post, and while I'm at it, at what Camille Paglia has to say to day over on Salon.com. Putting the two of them into one sentence (I like them both) is my revenge....

Oxford, July 6 2009

I am writing from a comfortable room overlooking Magpie Lane, just outside of the Merton walls. I sat on those walls just a few moments ago, smoking a Dark Sumatra cigar after high table and chatting with a Virginian about the US. Frankly, reader, I am amazed to be here, but then again, the Vietnamese coffee I'm drinking--a gift of a class of students from that republic--and the day I've had flitting between the wilder parts of the British establishment and my own life should on their own have inured me to anything.

My life is factually quite strange, but I thank God for the chance it gives me to teach. The ostensible reason I'm here is to teach a course on Winston Churchill and the end of the British Empire, but I find myself, well--not to be too pretentious or confessional--regenerating in a city I was angry with when I left it three years ago to go to the bar. They say, in the library to my left, that the ghost of Duns Scotus walks around, and I find myself wondering what similar infatuations of the mind it has seen over the years. Once, I saw sodium lights from pub windows as a child; now they illuminate the place behind my eyes.

Odd. I ran for a pointless election in this city; I laughed and made love and wept within it, and I devoured its books and wrote my own. Who would ever have thought that it could make a person this contented? Oh, I know--when I am contented, something always happens, and I tend to be at odds with this reality. But, as I say my prayers silently tonight, I thank--though I would not be so protestantly presumptuous as to do it directly--the God that gave all this to me.

I hope that you are happy reader. It's a gift. It clears worry and strain and the murderous badness of the world clean off. I wish I could convey some formula for it to you, I really do. This is a world in which so many are going to sleep in fear of losing their homes, or their children, or their lives, and in which this ratcheting crisis moves relentlessly against the material things it set up as better than each of us. I'm conscious of the wars and the near despair tonight--don't mistake me. But, well, such is the confessional nature of this blog, I wanted to convey my happiness.

Good luck to you.