Back to the 1950s, part 2

John Quiggin18 Comments

There’s another way in which Howard’s comments suggesting kids should drop out at Year 10 are out of touch with reality. The implied background is one in which parents (and social pressure in general) are increasingly pushing kids to finish year 12 and go on to University. In reality, Australia’s school completion rate[1] peaked in 1992 and the number of new Australian undergraduate enrolments in universities has barely changed since the Howard government was elected. The suggestion that we need even more dropouts is simply bizarre.

In most developed countries, including European countries that do a much better job on technical education than we do, universal high-school completion is either a central policy goal or an established reality. It’s true, as many have pointed out that this implies a need for schools to adopt a broader approach to what is offered in Years 11 and 12, with more technically-oriented courses, and less exclusive focus on traditional preparation for university. Oddly enough, however, most recent criticism of the school curriculum has focused on the fact that they aren’t teaching enough Shakespeare.

fn1. This measure isn’t perfect and the 1992 peak is probably overstated. But the general pattern is clear enough.

Back to the 1950s

John Quiggin51 Comments

John Howard’s suggestion that young people should drop out of school in Year 10 and get a trade is both bad advice and an indication that, on this as on many other issues, Howard hasn’t updated his world view since the 1950s[1]. As Tim Dunlop says, it’s unlikely anyone in the government is giving this advice to their own kids.

Howard’s advice is exactly that given by many working class parents to their sons in the 1950s and, at the time it worked pretty well. It is only since the 1980s that the problems have emerged for older workers with limited education and obsolete skills. Parents in the 1950s can scarcely be blamed for failing to foresee this, but Howard has no such excuse.

In today’s world, car mechanics are increasingly required to debug computer programs[2], and virtually everyone with a job[3] has to deal with substantial volumes of (literal or digital) paperwork. This is one reason why the “sitting next to Sally” apprenticeships Howard is so fond of have increasingly been replaced by TAFE courses. For practical purposes, the skills of a Year 10 dropout are not adequate for these courses.

Even if, in the current labour market, it would be possible to get a trade with a Year 10 education, it would still be a bad idea in the long run. Skills become obsolete and replacing them requires the kind of flexibility acquired from education.

These 1950s attitudes have translated into disastrous policies regarding post-secondary education. The number of Australian students starting undergraduate degrees has barely changed since 1996 (I think it may actually have declined in the last few years). And despite a lot of rhetoric, the TAFE system is in a dreadful mess, which can be traced back, in the end, to inadequate funding.

There’s a lot of justified concern about inadequate investment in infrastructure. But an even bigger problem under this government has been declining investment in human capital.

fn1. In saying this, I don’t mean to adopt the Keating sneer about the 1950s. There were a lot of positive features of the 1950s, in particular full employment, and the associated fact that someone with a Year 10 education could leave school and walk into a reasonably well-paid job. But wishing won’t bring these things back.

fn2. Although I was aware of this in theory, I still got a mild surprise when I was talking to a guy at the service desk and he mentioned that some problem with my engine would probably go away by itself when they ran the software upgrade that went with my routine service.

fn3. Admittedly, there are plenty of casual jobs (for example, in the fast-food industries) that are designed not to require this kind of thing. But, with rare exceptions they don’t provide any real route to permanent jobs on decent pay.

Monday Message Board

John Quiggin56 Comments

It’s time for the regular Monday message board, where you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. I haven’t had time to post on the competing royal tours, but I’d be interested in readers’ thoughts. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

Long march to freedom

John Quiggin7 Comments

As mentioned previously, there has been a general increase in repression in Iran in recent years, and several bloggers have been arrested and imprisoned Similar repression is taking place in Bahrain. You can keep up with developments and suggested actions with The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

This is worth thinking about in relation to the current euphoria about positive developments in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine (and some positive gestures in Egypt and Saudi Arabia), and attempts to tie all this to the elections in Iraq.

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Etiquette tips, please

John Quiggin37 Comments

The Fin reprints this piece from the New Statesman by Nick Cohen

I think you can smoke in the Groucho[1], but you can’t in Waitrose or at any Islington dinner party I’ve been to in the past decade. The social taboo against smoking is becoming absolute, in the middle classes at any rate … it is social death to put a cigarette in your mouth, not to stuff cocaine up your nose.

I’m obviously out of touch here. I thought it was de rigeur to go to the bathroom to snort cocaine, and to go out to the porch to smoke. But now I fear total embarrassment at my next middle-class dinner party: obviously I should have the cocaine served at the table. Can anyone give me more details here – are individual salvers the way to go, for example, and is it OK to ask guests to bring some of their own?

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The 7 per cent solution

John Quiggin35 Comments

If you’re trying to reconcile unlimited wants with limited resources, and someone is willing to lend you the money, borrowing looks like a neat solution. For nations, collective borrowing is measured by the current account deficit[1]. Until quite recently, however, it seemed to be generally accepted that there was a limit beyond which such borrowing was imprudent and that the limit was around 5 per cent of GDP.

There are some good arguments against the traditional view, and we’d better all hope they are valid, though I fear they are not. I’m working on a big piece on this. More soon I hope.

fn1. More precisely, by the capital account surplus which is equal and opposite to the CAD.

Creeping capitalism

John Quiggin40 Comments

In today’s Fin (subscription required), Sinclair Davidson tries to resuscitate the claim that Australian taxpayers are suffering from severe bracket creep, a claim I refuted in my piece last week (over the fold). The case is so thin that he spends half of his article restating a version of the claim I’d already refuted, before admitting that it is spurious (this is the claim that the abolition of the old 66 per cent rate, by making 47 per cent the new top rate, put more people into the top tax bracket. While this is trivially true, it’s also clear that this change was the opposite of bracket creep).

Davidson’s second argument, involves an interesting redefinition of the terms of debate. The standard approach has been to look at either the real income level or the proportion of average weekly earnings at which the top rate is payable. The real income level has risen over time and the proportion of average weekly earnings has been roughly stable. Davidson instead looks at the proportion of taxpayers paying the top rate. Obviously, if pretax incomes become more unequal, as they did over the 1990s, this proportion will rise, and this is what he finds.
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Not an appealing judgement

John Quiggin25 Comments

This kind of thing makes me think that the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal has some sort of death-wish. It has overturned a conviction in a lengthy drug trial, on the grounds that the wrong person signed the indictment, although it was common ground that this had no effect on the fairness of the trial. Following a series of disastrous decisions to hold retrials in gang rape cases, which have already led to amendments to the law designed to repudiate the Court’s judgements[1], I’d have thought the judges would be cautious about playing this kind of game with technicalities.

A decision like this is bound to produce a further reaction, and probably an over-reaction, from the legislature. We could easily see changes to procedures, designed to preclude further appeals of this kind, that eliminate important safeguards against unfair trials. In their quest to protect the niceties of some imagined ideal system of law, appropriate to a world of unlimited resources and costless trials, the Court of Appeal is gravely damaging the system we actually have to live with.

fn1. For example, the Tayyab Sheikh case elicited an amendment to rules about publicity, and the recent successful appeals by the Skaf brothers have produced rules allowing retrials to be conducted on the basis of transcripts.