We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In Does Education Matter? Alison Wolf attacks, tin the words of the book’s subtitle, “myths about education and economic growth”. Here are a few paragraphs from the Introduction:
From the premise that a full-blown ‘knowledge economy’ is arriving now on our doorsteps, it is easy to slip into prescribing more and more of the raw material which apparently makes this possible: education. And of course it would be stupid to deny that education is central to any modern economy. Imagine the UK today – or the USA, or Greece, japan, Brazil – being run by a population. which is more than go per cent illiterate – the level of eleventh-century England.’ Imagine Microsoft or British Aerospace research and development in the hands of people all of whom had left school after only a primary-school education, or a drug industry dependent on people whose academic training was the intermingled science and alchemy of Newton’s day. Who could doubt that education matters?
But what doesn’t follow is that vast amounts of public. spending on education have been the key determinant of how rich we are today. Nor is it obvious that they will decide how much richer, or poorer, we will be tomorrow. The simple one-way relationship which so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn’t exist. Moreover, the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity become. Developed countries have now moved well beyond providing basic education. for all, and instead spend more and more on higher education, technical provision, vocational programmes, and adult training.
These are my main subject matter, for they are also the main recent targets of government policies inspired by ambitions for growth. Unfortunately, while an overwhelmingly strong case can be made for the state’s responsibilities in basic education – and, indeed, for the latter’s economic importance – not one of these newer enthusiasms deserves any such.accolade.
Alison Wolf
It is now an established Samizdatista hobby whenever we gather: taking the piss out of Brian for his unhealthy interest in car parks.
Well, you’re all completely wrong, and you’re all missing the point completely, or rather, getting hold of the right stick, but at completely the wrong end. Don’t you get it? The very thing that makes my fascination with car parks so laughable to all you idiots is my exact point. Car parks, now, are, almost all of them, crap. So, obviously, a car park spotter is ridiculous. Ho, ho, ho. But the crapness of car parks now is my exact point, and I am only a car park spotter if the car park in question, unlike almost all car parks nowadays, is worth spotting.
Like this one, linked to about a month ago by David Sucher of City Comforts Blog, but which I’ve only just noticed his posting about, in Staunton Virginia.
Said ArchNewsNow.com all those weeks ago:
Staunton, Virginia, has worked hard to preserve and enhance its historic neighborhoods and to keep its downtown vital and attractive. The city’s ongoing attention to streetscape, underground power, and building preservation is creating a vibrant, resurgent, and energetic community.
One of the “stars” of the downtown regeneration is, of all things, the New Street Parking Garage. The design for the garage, by Staunton-based Frazier Associates, came out of an inclusive team approach: the designers worked closely with government officials and local citizens (in a city known for its resistance to change) through an intensive public design process.
The result is a new “landmark” building at the entrance to downtown Staunton. “In the past, architects designed beautiful buildings for visitors to arrive in,” says design lead Kathy Frazier, AIA. “Somehow that didn’t get translated to parking garages, and people grew accustomed to parking in these ugly utilitarian buildings. The question we asked ourselves is ‘Why can’t we make a parking garage beautiful and celebrate the arrival sequence like we used to with train stations?’”
The idea of an ye olde looking car park doesn’t really appeal to me. Why can’t it look snazzy? Like, say, a snazzy car? But the reality of the thing seems actually to be rather handsome. And if a railway station can look ye olde, why can’t a car park? Thinking about it, all manner of high tech structures actually used to be done up in Greek Temple or Roman Villa style, such as water pumping stations, power stations, railway signal boxes, railway tunnel entrances, railway bridge towers. It isn’t just the grand city terminuses. So why not car parks?
But don’t let the argument about style deflect from the important thing about this, or any other such design, which is that concentrating parked cars in a heap rather than letting them sprawl all over the landscape doesn’t just rescue the aesthetics of car parking, but the aesthetics of the entire surrounding neighbourhood.
This Telegraph piece by John Mortimer is a characteristic mixture of good ideas and bad ideas, of humbug and whatever is the opposite of humbug. I’m sure that all White Rose readers would (a) agree with that characterisation, but (b) argue fiercely about which bit is humbug and which not. Which is the whole idea of this blog. Nevertheless I’d file it under White-Rose-relevant, so here are a few sample paragraphs to make that point:
So, through much of my life, I have witnessed what seemed to be a slow but measurable improvement in the administration of the law. That improvement was to continue, strangely enough, only until the advent of a Labour Government that seemed to have been born without a single civil libertarian instinct.
So now jury trials are to be diminished, previous convictions will be allowed in evidence so defendants will be convicted on what they did in the past, the presumption of innocence has been severely dented and the great principle that a guilty act must contain a guilty intention will be held not to apply in rape cases.
The right to habeas corpus has been denied in certain cases, where suspects may now be held in prison without the hope of trial or charges levelled against them. Just as shamefully, Tony Blair seems about to agree that British subjects should be subjected to what is a parody of a fair trial in Guantánamo Bay. Our great constitutional liberties, struggled for down the centuries, are now being denied.
The righteous wrath of Rumpole will be raised by the intention of the Home Secretary to remove sentencing from judges and hand it over to the vote-hungry hands of politicians anxious, as judges are not, to score political points and please the newspapers.
And so on and so forth. Read at will. Agree, and disagree.
White-Rose-relevant comments from Jim of Jim’s Journal about Homeland Security:
Now I happen to have a lot against Bush … besides the fact that I did not vote for him in 2000 and the only good thing I could think of to say about him then was that at least he wasn’t Al Gore.
I don’t think highly of his handling of national security – within the United States – that is, this ridiculous bureaucratic monstrosity called Homeland Security, headed by that total jerk Ridge. (What’s that matter with Ridge? Well, here’s just one thing, but it shows how wrong he is … He wants to use Homeland Security to track down child porn peddlers and Internet perverts. My goodness, how could there be anything wrong with that? Well, what does that have to do with national security? We have a multiplicity of police forces to handle ordinary crimes. Homeland Security was supposed to be about protecting us from terrorists, you know, 9/11 … So if the terrorist problem is so under control that he has to go looking for other jobs to keep his minions busy, well let’s just save a few billion dollars and dissolve his agency instead.)
Indeed, but that of course is not how these things work. Once an “agency” is set up, it mmediately goes looking for other stuff to do as well, and hence in the fullness of time, potentially, instead.
Principles, once conceded in one policy area immediately go wandering, often in the form of the very agency that embodies the original concession.
This from the BBC:
Eavesdroppers, including stalkers and jealous spouses, are listening in on hundreds of thousands of private conversations in Britain every week because of a legal loophole, BBC News Online has discovered.
Telephone tapping without a valid warrant is illegal under both the 1998 Wireless Telegraphy Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
The law relating to intrusive surveillance devices – bugs – is less clear.
But it is legal to trade in taps, bugs and covert cameras, which explains the myriad websites, mail order businesses and spy shops.
And so on.
I’m a libertarian and I don’t quite know what I think about all that. I mean, I’m in favour of trades of all kinds, including lots of trades that other people aren’t in favour of. I think, for example, that it ought to be legal to buy a small and sneaky camera, if you want to buy one and if someone wants to sell you one. It’s a bit like guns. It’s what you do, and in this particular case it’s also where you do it, that matters, not the mere owning or buying of the thing itself.
But my attitude to posting on White Rose is: if it’s of interest and relevance, stick it up. I’m trying to give the customers here, that is to say the people the editors here want to be the customers here, what they want. No doubt they’ll straighten me out if I’m doing it wrong.
More drug war chaos:
A prosecution based on a huge undercover police operation in which £15 million was laundered then returned to suspected drug dealers was thrown out of court today.
In a lengthy ruling that allowed 10 defendants to walk free and left the taxpayer to foot an enormous legal bill, a judge branded the “honeypot” operation as nothing less than “state-created crime”. He said it was “massively illegal”, and, in the case of two suspects, amounted to entrapment.
That’s the Guardian. I couldn’t find anything about this at the Indy or the Telegaph, but that could just be me.
Here’s another for the Samizdata Wonders of Capitalism collection.
In her intro at the top of her blog, Natalie Solent says:
Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing. You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
Me too. Not to do it mind, but when I go to Natalie, I hope to be reading about it every so often. But it’s mostly about politics, news, libertarianism, etc.
However, yesterday there was a sewing item.
Enough of politics …
Good, good.
… I have got me an overlocker.
What’s that?
It cost more than my last car but two.
No, not what did it cost? What is it?
These beasties are to proper sewing machines what the microwave oven is to a proper oven – the quote comes from Jan Saunders of Sewing for Dummies fame, and it’s true. An overlocker can’t do some things that a proper sewing machine can but it does its more limited range of tasks much faster and, once you have one, the change in the relative cost in effort of each action inevitably changes the whole style of cuisine, sorry, sewing. For benighted readers who do not know what an overlocker is, take off your T-shirts. Yes, very nice. Now turn the T inside out and look at the seams. They were sewn, bound and cut in one operation by an overlocker. The fluffy, softer thread used is distinctive, and overlockers are better at not distorting stretchy fabrics than an ordinary sewing machine is. In the opposite direction, they are also better at not puckering up thin, fray-prone “brittle” fabrics. I have already had the guts to make a child’s dressing-up cloak from some ridiculous shiny stuff that I had kept for years waiting for the day when I got my Black Belt.
This is the …
… Janome MyLock 644D for the hordes of sewing-geeks who infest this blog like swarming locusts.
Yes, we have swarms of those too, because we have swarms of everything. But for the benefit of the more typical Samizdata reader, Mr Natalie helps out:
My husband has kindly translated sewing geek language into Engineering: the overlocker is to the ordinary sewing machine what the vertical mill is to the lathe; you can do almost anything on a lathe including vertical milling – but a mill does the job so much better.
Serious point about capitalism, excellence of, to end with: Some of you may not have understood all of what Natalie, or even Mr Natalie, says about her new Janome MyLock 644D overlocker. I think it is clear that she likes it, but I for one can’t claim to be entirely sure about all the detail of exactly why. But with capitalism, this doesn’t matter. All that is required in a free market is that the people involved directly in a deal understand what they are doing.
In particular, no politicians need get involved, or feel that they have to understand what is going on, before matters can proceed satisfactorily. Imagine how much more primitive and miserable life would be if politicians did have to understand everything and supervise everything.
Well, you don’t have to. Samizdata is full of reports about just such circumstances.
Take Cuba, a classic “The Boss has to understand everything” kind of place. Paul Marks and David Carr weren’t agreeing yesterday about what will happen next, but between them they describe what a grim and ghastly and easily understood place Cuba now is very well.
And for an example nearer to home of circumstances ever more directly supervised by the politicians and consequently ever more shambolic, look no further than this posting which I also did here only yesterday, about Britain’s ever more state controlled examination system.
Our Revered Leader Perry de Havilland has been telling us in conversation that our postings here are better than they were in the early days of this blog. I’m sure I hope so, and I believe that something similar may also apply to David Farrer over at Freedom and Whisky.
His latest posting is a particularly choice item, based on an equally choice story in the Sunday Herald, about a potential collision between ramblers in Scotland and trains in Scotland, caused by an actual collision between “Right to Roam” legislation and the decision to bring charges of Corporate Manslaughter against six of Britain’s railway ex-bosses for an earlier prang.
The railway infrastructure has been taken out of the hands of shareholders and into the safekeeping of selfless (sic) public servants. Surely this kind of mix-up shouldn’t occur. Don’t tell me that there’s something wrong with socialism! In the meantime the local council is forcing open the gates over the tracks and Network Rail is locking them up again.
The folk at Network Rail are – wisely – looking out for number one:
“If people are serious about crossing live railways, the safest way is by underpass or bridge and somebody has to fund that – and it’s not going to be the railway because it’s not our responsibility. The responsibility must either rest with councils or central government.”
Dave Fordwych, the Sunday Herald man, thinks both policies are foolishness, but David has the answer to the problem:
I think that a solution may be found if the Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling, has a quiet word with the Secretary of State for Scotland who is, er, Alistair Darling.
And I thought that Rod Liddle, in his recent Spectator piece about the Kelly Affair had been joking about …
… the day that Tony Blair announced his embarrassing and botched Cabinet reshuffle, the one where people suddenly found out that they were simultaneously Secretary of State for Transport and Scotland.
David adds a personal recollection to the effect that Darling seems inclined already towards talking to himself.
Funnily enough, the only time I have ever seen Mr Darling, my own MP, was on an aeroplane flying from London to Edinburgh and, yes, he was talking to himself.
“Joined up government” is what David calls his posting. You can’t get much more joined up than this. But, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
Samizdata hasn’t done all that much reporting of or commentary on the Kelly Affair and related matters, so the least we can do is nod humbly towards those who have done more, such as these persons in interesting posts like this, and this guy, David Steven. I’ve no time for more now as I am soon to be out socialising, but this piece, about Andrew Gilligan‘s track record during the Iraq War, is a classic example of the power of the blogosphere, first because the material which David Steven is analysing itself first appeared on a BBC Blog, and second, because of how good an influential this particular piece has been.
Did the BBC realise quite what a hostage to fortune it would be to allow their foreign correspondents to just say whatever they liked, and have it all up there permanently on the record? They already know that if they tamper retrospectively with more stuff, that only gets them into more trouble.
(Someone recently blogged about a case of the BBC surreptitiously adding some distancing quotes to some outrageous piece of Stalinoid nonsense which it had presented as straight fact, after a blogger had already quoted it as an example of their bias, but I can’t remember who tells this story. Helpful comment please.)
We’ve been, as I say, a bit behind the story here, but I think I can feel a feeding frenzy beginning to develop about the BBC, not unlike the one that did such serious things not so long ago to the New York Times.
I think the vital change has not been the complaining that’s long been going on here. What has changed is the American attitude. 9/11 did so many things, and one of them was to cause Americans to pay more attention not just to the big wide world out there, but also to the most influential organisations, theirs and other peoples’, that have for decades been reporting it.
And I wonder if the BBC saw that one coming on 9/12.
I did a posting yesterday at my Education Blog about a suggestion for a more “free market” approach to Britain’s examination system. It is of course not a suggestion for a real free market, merely for a centrally licensed franchise system.
Anyway, this comment appeared today about this, which gives an excellent if anecdotal feel for the state of education in Britain now:
A friend of mine (source protection here) was asked to mark double the usual amount of scripts this year because that particular exam did not have enough markers. That’s 400 scripts in about 4 weeks.
Reasons for the lack of recruits: a) the markers are paid peanuts b) it’s just at the beginning of the summer holidays, and most teachers would rather have a rest than do even more marking c) teaching is such a depressing business to be in at the moment that many of the sparkiest – who would make competent examiners – are getting the hell out.
Exam board solutions:
This year they offered to pay schools for supply cover so that instead of teaching, examiner-teachers could spend school time marking scripts. Not surprisingly, the take-up was small.
Gossip from my anonymous friend: exam boards are considering making a deal with schools whereby if the school wants to sit that board’s exams, they’ll have to supply n teachers to mark them.
I can’t wait to see it all implode, necessitating some market solutions rather than this government-sponsored-shoe-string job.
My worry is that the “market solutions” they resort to will, like that proposed “free market” exam franchising system, not be real market solutions. The government will stay totally in command of the curriculum, and the “free market” will just be another more complicated way to pay state hirelings.
A real free market in exams would mean competing curricula, competing exams to examine mastery of said curricula, and teachers, parents, pupils and employers organising, advising and choosing at will, to suit themselves and their various ambitions and purposes. The government’s job would be to stay out of it all, while every so often making the occasional discouraging remark about how education is over-rated and that it prefers ignorance, especially for children, thereby giving the adults who are organising everything the confidence that the government would continue to stay out of everything, and thereby getting the kids all excited about it.
Dream on Brian. Which is what I am for, I suppose.
How exactly did the Cold War end, and who exactly won it, and lost it?
I like this summary, provided by someone or something called “The Friendly Ghost”, which he (it) wrote in response to the accusation that the current President of the US has also been telling the occasional untruth.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he was briefed on the military capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. At the end of the briefing, Reagan asked, “Is that all the forces we can afford?” The answer was yes. The president then asked, “Then how can the Soviet Union afford such a huge military?” He was told they couldn’t. At that point, Reagan decided to see the Soviet Union’s 20-year military build-up, and raised them Star Wars.
Now, President Reagan couldn’t just say he was building a shield to shoot down ICBMs. He had to demonstrate that the technology actually worked. But it didn’t really work. So the decision was made to rig the tests, so that it looked like the system worked. In other words, HE LIED. But the Soviets believed the lie, and bankrupted themselves trying to catch up to the Americans. Gorbachev eventually came to power, and shouted “glasnost!” A few years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.
The moral of the story? By telling a lie, Ronald Reagan helped bring down the United States’ biggest, most powerful enemy, without firing a shot. Sun Tsu would be proud.
I’m not exactly sure what the provenance of the above is. It seems to be a summary of things that the Friendly Ghost guy got from this guy.
The Friendly Ghost then continues, in his own voice, so to speak.
Yes, the story is a simplification of events. But a couple of months ago, I watched a documentary on the History Channel about Star Wars. The Soviets really were that paranoid about SDI, at least for a few years. Although by the time of the Reykjavik Summit, there was some suspicion about the effectiveness of SDI, Reagan’s actions in not giving it up helped sustain the illusion in many minds in the Soviet leadership. But the most telling statistic? When the Soviet Union fell, it was discovered that the CIA had woefully underestimated Soviet military spending. The Soviets were spending 25% of their GNP on their military. Yes Virginia, there was a reason the Soviet Union fell. The military spending killed the economy. And why were the Soviets spending so much on their military? Two words: Ronald Reagan.
I was always of and remain of the opinion that the proper percentage figure for Soviet “defence” spending was one hundred.
A lot of my libertarian friends, acquaintances and competitors believe that the USSR would have collapsed anyway, a victim of its own “internal contradictions” – i.e. its useless economy, inability to make PCs or washing machines or jeans or decent cars, or make sensible use of fax machines and photocopiers.
My feeling about that is, maybe it would, but how might it have collapsed? Had the old USSR not been faced by a weapon-wielding USA breathing fire, brimstone and Tom Cruise movies all over it, and flashing cool photos of stealth bombers all over the place, might the USSR not have collapsed outwards, so to speak? Might it perhaps have attacked lazy, fat, pre-occupied Western Europe, in order to get more plunder, and to divert its domestic population from its domestic griefs with foreign glories, Henry V style – and because it preferred going out with a bang to going out with the whimper that it actually did go out with?
My favourite end-of-Cold-War moment came in the late eighties when, on a British TV show, a Dimbleby asked Caspar Weinberger what defence spending was being “prioritised”. Said Weinberger, after a thoughtful pause: “Well, pretty much everything.” I knew then that it was over.
I know, I’m a libertarian and I’m not supposed to enjoy stuff like that, but I did and I do. Given what Reagan could do with the buttons he had on his desk, and did not have, I think he did very well.
Broken news, from whenever, but I didn’t know. Paul Johnson has written a book about Art. Thanks to Michael Blowhard for the news.
Its American publication date is October, which means it should be available in early-to-mid September. The publisher compares the book to Gombrich, and describes it as a comprehensive history of art that covers everything from rock painting up the present. I seem to remember that Johnson himself is a serious watercolorist and art fanatic, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the art-crit part of the book is as good as the history-telling will no doubt be. I’m also betting that the view he delivers of art history won’t be the standard one, to say the least. I’m especially curious to see how he treats the 20th century — a little birdy has already told me that Warhol gets not much more than one sentence in the book.
Can I wait until it piles up in the remainder shops? No, I don’t think that will happen.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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