White, working class boys are performing badly academically

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The educational under-performance of Britain’s white working-class males is “desperate”. Less then 10% of white boys from deprived backgrounds go to university, the lowest share of any demographic group. Boys lag behind girls at all stages of schooling – in few other areas, says the Higher Education Policy Institute, is there “such a big gender gap but so few proposals to remedy it”. Where white working-class boys are concerned, one thing is paramount: to bring degree courses closer to their social context and aspirations. Investing more money in the further education colleges and technical courses that have been allowed to wither should be the Government’s urgent priority.   (Miranda Green, Financial Times and The Week 11 January 2020)

My take:  Years ago the British government made a really stupid decision (so what’s new?)  They allowed technical colleges and polytechnics to call themselves “universities”.  At one point, Oxford Polytechnic was arguable harder to get into than the big university down the road.  So, instead of only offering practical and training, these new universities became more and more academic, leaving the young lads with fewer training-for-life opportunities.

Secondly, in the old days the way to get on in life was to join a big company as apprentices and be trained on the job over a period of years. The pay was not great, but there was a reliable future ahead for young lads. This is what the Germans did and still do, amazingly effectively.  This more or less disappeared in England.  I strongly believe in education – the broadening and training of the mind – and in the arts as a means.  But this is not necessarily appropriate for everyone and especially for non-academic lads good with their hands.  The latter are now floundering, and it is the fault of governments.

Bring back apprenticeships!

The relevance to Epicureanism?:  We should be offering opportunities to everyone whether from poor of well-off backgrounds.  How can you achieve ataraxia when you feel you have no future?

Recycling waste

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Newsletter note from a neighbor who moved to the US from China:

“Hi neighbors, I know lots of you have heard of the recycling crisis in the US since China’s ban on importing foreign garbage in 2017. There are many articles about this issue, such as this one from the guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills. It says: “As municipalities are forced to deal with their own trash instead of exporting it, they are discovering a dismaying fact: much of this plastic is completely unrecyclable.

“The issue is with a popular class of plastics that people have traditionally been told to put into their recycling bins – a hodgepodge of items such as clamshell-style food packaging, black plastic trays, take-out containers and cold drink cups, which the industry dubs “mixed plastic”. It has become clear that there are virtually no domestic manufacturers that want to buy this waste in order to turn it into something else.

“Take Los Angeles county.  The Guardian reports that recycling facilities are separating “mixed plastics” from those plastics which still retain value – such as water bottles, laundry detergent bottles and milk jugs – and, contrary to what customers expect, sending them directly to a landfill or incinerator.

”I also want to add that the process of recycling is super-polluting. My hometown in China is not far from a processing center that used to accept plastic recycling from the US.  The cancer rate there skyrocketed and the groundwater is now no longer  drinkable.”  (Name withheld)

I once went round a recycling plant with my wife. Most plastics, we were told, were being recycled. At that time we had to separate out different types of plastic, ready for collection. What I didn’t take on board is that the (mostly Asian) countries that took the recycling were stopping doing so.  It now seems that most of it now goes into landfills – not a happy situation, to say the least.

What is nor explained is why the plastics have to be used in the first place (cost, presumably).  Salad, for instance, comes in large, clumsy clear plastic boxes. Why is  it impossible to produce mass recyclable plastics, or similar materials that are transportable, light and hygienic?  This  would be welcomed  by everyone, or at least all those who would welcome reducing the role of oil-producing companies.

 

 

 

$16 trillion bad dream?

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The year 2019 saw the continuation of “the world’s most bizarre financial experiment ever”, said Merryn Somerset Webb on MoneyWeek.com – “negative interest rates”. The European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank were among those charging investors for the privilege of holding their bonds. There are now $16trn-worth of negative-yielding government bonds in the global economy – an unprecedented development.

No one knows what this means, or how much we should fear it. Perhaps, as former US Fed chair Alan Greenspan observes, “zero has no meaning”. Or perhaps it is a sign of something “more terrifying” to come.  (The Week, 28 December 2019).

 Negative interest rates are a tool of monetary policy used by the European Central bank to help stabilise the economy, but their effects long term are not certain.  As I understand it, if there were a recession the central banks have already used all the tools available to effect a maximum stimulus, and this is the urgent and macro problem that we face in the future.  Are there enough resources  in reserve to withstand yet another new crisis that effects the world economy?  The  coronavirus comes to mind.

 

 

 

 

Ugly inequality

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The US is not the only country where widening inequality is a disturbing trend. In the UK a recent Office for National Statistics report estimates that the top 10% of earners now own 45% of Britain’s £14trn total pot, while the bottom 30% own less than 2%.   (The Week, 28 December 2019).

If I regularly return to this problem it is because historically inequality nearly always eventually leads to decline, social discontent, loss of ataraxia, even revolution (as in Tsarist Russia, 18th Century France, and various other countries in our very lifetimes).

This is not something sought after by Epicureans, to put it mildly.  It destroys trust, social cohesion and fairness, and puts too much power into the hands of far too few.   It is not surprising that it suits politicians, who can fund their elections with sordid deals in back rooms with a small number of very rich donors (who are doing very well at present, thank you),  but it makes “one person, one vote” a charade.

Why can’t  all our fellow citizens see this?  Why do they tolerate it, along with gerrymandering?  I can’t believe that they are less intelligent than the people who lived at the time the American Constitution was devised or that social media sucks up all their thinking time.  Maybe they are just disengaged?

 

 

Decline in Croatia, boom in Spain

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(A few statistics, I’m afraid…..)

The prime minister of Croatia, Andrej Plenkovic – whose government has just assumed the rotating presidency of the EU – has warned that his country is suffering a “population loss equivalent to losing a small city every year”, and called for EU-wide strategies to tackle the “existential” threat in southern and eastern Europe posed by falling birth rates and mass emigration.

Last year,  230,000 Croatians left their country (mostly for Germany, Austria and Ireland) between 2013 and 2016; the country’s population is just 4.2 million. The populations of ten of the EU’s 28 member states fell in 2018, with the biggest relative drops recorded in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Romania.

But….the Financial Times reports a quite different situation in Spain:

“A decade after Spain faced economic crisis, prompting hundreds of thousands of people to flee the country, its population has reached its highest ever level as immigrants and returning locals flood into the eurozone’s fastest growing major economy. Spain’s population grew by 276,000 people in 2018 to nearly 47 million, the fastest annual increase since 2009. The rise came largely from immigration, both from traditional sources in Latin America, especially Venezuela and Morocco as well as other European countries such as Italy and Portugal.

“In the four years to 2016, Spain’s population declined by nearly 400,000 people. The fall reflected the severity of the crisis that hit the country: between 2008 and 2013 the Spanish economy shrank by nearly 10 per cent. At the end of 2013, more than one in four persons of working age was unemployed; nearly 60 per cent of those under 25 seeking a job could not find one. Now Spain is more than four years into a strong economic recovery. The improving picture in the labour market helps explain the migration inflow and the fall in emigration by Spaniards. More Spaniards returned home than left the country last year, for the first time in at least seven years.  Spain’s economy has been expanding at twice the eurozone average since 2015 and it is expected to continue to do so this year.

My comment:

Of course, what isn’t discussed is why the population declining in countries like Croatia and Italy but growing in Spain? The improving picture in the labour market helps explain the Spanish migration inflow and the fall in emigration by Spaniards. But the labour market usually responds to government policy.  So what is wrong with Croatia and Italy?  is it government incompetence or could it be a culture of corruption, or both?  Corruption in Eastern Europe is a well- known problem.