shopping cart software, economics, UK manufacturing: a blog with a terrible name
Friday, 23 October 2015
boring economics teaching is interesting
Looking at the textbook page 440, figure 19.2, do you think the 1979 monetarist policy worked for the UK?
Definitely agree Mostly agree Neither agree nor disagree Mostly disagree Definitely disagree "We used to believe on Keynsian solutions; now we believe on monetarist solutions" - an economics professor, standing at one end of an economics teaching room at Keele University 1985-7 Words fail me
It's the mid-eighties. A quarter of the UK workforce is unemployed, sick, or on a scheme like The Community Programme or Youth Opportunities. This is an Economics degree course at a midlands university called Keele, which has lost a third of its budget on ministerial whim. Radical economic policies have closed a fifth of UK manufacturing in five years - the main part which is private sector, and the part of that that's good at exporting. The radical economic policy was to fiddle the exchange rate upwards by paying too much for government debt. Investors converted their currencies to buy the pay-too-much government debt so the pound rose and exporting became unfairly harder.
The governing party takes PR advice from Bell Pottinger's founder & thrives on provocation against scapegoats , as read-out at a party conference by Peter Lilly MP.
As the treasury closes the private sector by fiddling exchange rates, the government is scared to close the remaining public sector jobs, paid from borrowed money as this shrinking private economy pays less tax; the government runs-up a huge debt. It doesn't dare cause even more employment by closing-down services like Keele completely. So there are still 3,000 students and a few tutors: some students get a chance to ask a question of the great man, the Professor of Economics.
Some people would think this controversial. Including the ones who have persuaded search engines (I think I can prove) that this is a page designed to defame one person, and so not suitable for listing even though it gets a lot of views anyway. I may be wrong but the person they have in mind is not a Thatcher economist or successor from the Bank of England, but a 60-odd in 1980-something in a V-neck pullover and tweed with non-standard private opinions and an impressive past - more impressive than his economics teaching. Although his course had 40 weeks and glum-looking students where other courses had maybe 100 weeks and keen students, and a higher staff ratio, so this was a mundane situation.
He pulls these anecdotes about bad economics teaching together.
He shows the problem in the end because he had worked n places where critical thinking and evidence and discussion get a tutor the sack, as he discovered after a teach-in protest at the University of Califorinia in the McArthy era, He tried working as s docker, then at the least applied-for university in the USA, and finally got a chance to play-safe at a larger Uni before going to the UK on a sabbatical from which he could not return.
This pattern continues. People have to work in Hong Kong or Turkey or all kinds of places where free thought gets tutors the sack, and these people deserve respect and sympathy but not a right to control the syllabus.
So, if you are a lawyer funded by Keele Uni or a relative of this man or whoever you are, please get in tough with me directlyrather than trying to keep this site secret.
Some students would want to know how to argue back against conventional ideas, getting clarity, exposing failures, suggesting alternatives. Rather than just campaign against the cuts in a partisan kind of way which doesn't suggest alternatives. There was no need for maths, and anyway there were cheap PCs around that could to the maths. The need was for critical thinking, ideas, ability to look-up facts, and maybe rules of thumb about what works.
Some students looked resigned to a boring course. I suppose their careers advice was a bit like mine - worse than useless - and some were mis-led to believe economics degrees a trade qualification, to suffer & pass with patience and economy. Like a Corgi gas-fitters qualification or a B-ed. or accountancy or social work or shorthand or law society membership. The mistake was easier to make at the time, because more peoples' parents were used to careers of stable jobs for employers, obtained with CVs and interviews and maybe - just possibly - the one line on the CV that said something like "degree in Economics and English at Keele, 1984-1987, and Foundation Year 1983".
"They said that you were easily-led, and they were half-right"
[The Smiths - Reel Around the Fountain, lyric, 1983] The local MP quoted an estimate in parliament that year. It was an estimate that 20,000 of 50,000 workers in the pottery industry had lost their jobs. This stuff was reported in the small print of big papgers, but it was possible, if you read the newspapers, to believe that a much smaller proportion of the workforce was made redundant, and the cause was not fiddled exchange-rates but some sort of efficiency-drive that involved shrinking the public sector.
Wikipedia still puts that view, quoting unemployment as I think 17% because it leaves-out the government employment schemes and the thirteen tweaks to the statistics, such as not counting anyone over 60. Nowadays you can google numbers on The Community Programme and Youth Opportunities from statements to parliament in Hansard, but at the time they were harder to find, just as official statistics for the time are still hard to find as they pre-date the current series. Some students might have believed the newspapers but there was still a figure of three million officially unemployed. Even these students must have but wondered: isn't it rather a lot?
So various overlapping groups of students were sat at desks, ready to start talking to each other and learning to solve economic problems with expert help and all the tools and data that a university can provide and then maybe, with skills learned that way, some would be better at arguing-back against economic arguments. Maybe if they worked with money after study, this would be good practice. It might even help them get a job. The local MP had quoted something about employment in the "Stoke on Trent Travel to Work Area", which is how I found the quote. It's in the title of a bit of research that Keele's Department of Economics and Management Science was funded to do, so we had some of the figures sitting in the college office next door I suppose.
Digression on Peter Lilley
In later life I sometimes dealt with tenants as rep for a bureaucracy. Tenants have more paternal law than freeholders; their boilers have to be checked in ways that freeholders would find odd..
There are laws to stop a law-abiding landlord going into a tenant's flat to check gas safety, even with reasonable steps taken.
On another web page, the Gas Safety Regulations, signed by Peter Lilley, require landlords to go-in with a rare qualified plumber and check the draw on the boiler, which is done by lighting a fag in front of it and seeing which way the smoke goes. The draft I read was signed by Peter Lilley, although a quick search finds a minister called Allan Meale signing-off.
There is no reasonableness clause about tenants who do not want you to send the worlds' cheapest plumber in, just to light a fag in front of their boiler. Maybe the tenant doesn't like that sort of thing, just as most freeholders wouldn't like it. Maybe the tenant is hard to deal with, or out long-hours working as a plumber because of the shortage.
If you asked enough MPs why they do the job, a lot would put the hope of being a minister on their list, but when they finally get the chance they don't seem good at the job or able to do it at all in this case.
Chapter One:
Some headings often applied to the UK in the 1980s
I am not quite sure where these headings come from; I absorbed them from somewhere. Probably TV, newspapers, and the first half of Evan Davis' Made in Britain book. I read it up to the point where he said it was "irrational" to make M&S clothing in a democracy with a good human rights record and a social insurance system - a country called the UK where he and his readers live. I got too cross with him to enjoy reading any more. Expert economists are like that; they can be ignorant and irritating however nice and approachable they are face-to-face. On TV, I watched a program called "The 80s" by Dominic Sandford and I think I managed to watch it to the end before talking back to the telly rather embarassingly, or anything of that kind.
Finance and North Sea Oil
Technically, turnover in the economy stopped shrinking after the first quarter of 1980 as North Sea Oil and financial services added some numbers. That is the official economic history, easy to find. But if you are a human you can't earn a living as a piece of oil, and you wouldn't want to work selling payment protection insurance or private pensions now that people are allowed to contract-out of the state earnings related pension scheme. My dad tried it. You really wouldn't. It was meant to be more efficient than the ministry system because half the first one or two year's subscription went to a sales rep, calling on prospect after prospect in hope of one or two sales a year. Private insurance is like that - there's a lot of margin for sales and admin. "Because" was sarcastic. It was the same for car insurance and if anyone knows how to look-up the figures for the current online system, it's still probably expensive.
Officially there was also something called a big bang by which buyers and sellers were allowed to be the same person while acting fairly for outsiders - I never really understood it, but the system that failed on Lloyds insurance was something like that, a system by which insiders made commission at the expense of outsiders like Lloyds names by buying and selling things to each other round the office. Then they stopped taking-on new names as insurance underwriters; they are too ashamed and the system was too broken. So, if you are dead posh and your relatives own a stately home, they can no longer pledge its value as Lloyds names to get money. There isn't a scheme for other people to join-in either. It is a dead scheme, but the Big Bang was a good thing officially, despite what happened next.
The growth of services in the economy
Sales reps and servants
You wouldn't want to work providing services for the those who work in finance either, selling them cars & coffees, consumer goods & powders. The conventional idea is that there was something called a Big Bang in which buyers and sellers in some city institutions could be the same person, more or less, in the name of efficiency while handling your pension. This was meant to lead to a huge growth in financial services. A Keele graduate mentions what happened in his book, The Price of Fish. People expected a surge in commuting on London Transport, like a big wave at peak times. It turned out to be a rising tide, spread over 24 hours. Some of the new jobs provided highly-paid financial services to the world round the clock. Some of the new jobs were shift-work to provide coffee or hotels or homeless hostels and even alcohol services. I did some of them. In Liverpool, there was no longer a rush-hour at all.
Pointless prices
Maybe economists can come-up with some measure of how pointless an economy seems to those who work in it, and compare with some other measures of efficiency.
I thought at the time there should be a survey of how much more people pay for a new fridge, compared to the price of a reconditioned fridge that does the same thing. The premium is paid for brand and newness over a price paid for a well-specified good that's not quite new and not quite branded.
Shopkeepers have a similar idea called the advertised brand, such as Dulux paint, which is presumably also good for opacity and paintability, and sells for more than own-brand or un-advertised brand such as Johnson's paint which might be just as good. In the world of paint, we also suffer from a lack of decent technical information about opacity and paintability at the point of sale, so I suppose we consumers can't be completely blamed for paying too much for advertised brands, even though it is pretty silly and some of us consumers have got more money than sense - proving that markets don't work very well. I expect it us university vice chancellors on their vast salaries and stolen pensions that buy Dulux paint, alongside people with very little money who get into debt because they lack education and believe that it must be better because it sells more in a fair market.
At the time there was an emergency payment available for people on benefits who had nothing but an empty room and a small giro cheque. The payment was for a certain list of things - cooker, bed, fridge, sleeping-bag. The same kind of idea as a food bank. I forget how it worked - maybe it was something to do with vouchers claimable at shops that were part of the scheme of somethiing like that.
There was case law in benefits tribunals about over-charging or under-delivering, to say whether a Arga at Harrods or a scrap cooker at the dump set the price. The case law said that payment shoul pay for "reconditoned" appliances, with increasing detail I guess about what a "recondioned" cooker or fridge meant, carefully read by shopkeepers who recycled white goods.
The difference in price between a reconditioned fridge or cooker, and a new, branded fridge or cooker to the same standard could be called a credulity index or stupidity index. As the economy goes well, more and more people buy the advertised brands at full price. Then, in a recession, people have to buy whatever is available. Somewhere in between lies a good judgement about how much to pay for white goods, and it is probably the amount specified by tribunal case law about what "reconditioned" means. From the seller's point of view, there is the concept to the advertised brand as well. I remember being told that Tredair boots were worth trying to sell for double cost price +VAT, while advertised brands like Doc Martens sold for a bit more.
Pointless jobs
This was the time when people invented pointless jobs like the bar job of asking "what table are you sitting at?" to someone not yet sitting at a table, and then bringing-over some warm soup, crockery and cutlery, fifteen minutes later
Funny how times don't change. A generation or two earlier, there were green baize doors between paid and family areas of a large household in a big house, there were larger proportions of the population in one sort of institution or another from firms to nunneries to council institutions called workhouses to army regiments to a strange world of church army institutions for unmarried mothers - loads of people depended on institutions. Boarding schools were common. Each of these would have their internal rules, a bit like the rule that says that someone from the bar has to come-over and ask "how is your soup?"
The traditional pub system was to serve anything serve-able in a pint glass that took under a minute to pour -slurp - and that system could have been extended beyond beer and peanuts to soup or microwavable products. Ideally there would be a microwave and pressure-cooker combined for larger pub snacks and a range of nozzles for heating pub soup. That didn't happen, but I remember some pointless service jobs disappearing in the 80s. People prioritise better in recessions
More people went to gigs, paying at the door to get a rubber stamp on their hand. This saved the pointless job of one person selling a ticket and another taking it, tearing it in half, and giving it back again.
Some of the pointless work of shelf-stacking was saved at Kwik-Save supermarkets that used to put whole cartons of packets on the shelf and cut-off the side, a technique which only works if you have less choice of each essential product and just stack-up the one or two choices available. Another of their ideas was to let-out space for specialist work like selling fresh veg to fresh veg specialists, as in any other market, leaving the box-shifting and till-queues to be managed by Kwik-Save, who were good at box shifting and till-queues. At Fine Fare, customers served themselves with food out of a sack and weighed it at the checkout. Smaller cornflakes could also be bought in bags, to save the cost of a box. I think they started as over-sized cornflakes but they had broken into small ones by the time you got them home. There were a few shops that tried selling food by the scoop at the time - maybe some of them are still going - a bit like Primark for food. In areas of very high unemployment like Longton, near Keele, these were about the only shops available.
I vaguely remember the 1980s as the time when pointless jobs were invented, but I could be wrong - a lot of jobs like this were not available yet. I was young and didn't know first-hand how stupid a lot of jobs really are. Technically, the recession was over till the early 90s. Even if the jobs were in the south where they didn't pay housing costs. My brother had a job posting estate agent leaflets through letterboxes. "I don't want them", people would say. He thought of a good answer after a while. "I don't want them either and I've got a thousand of them". This kind of job was possible because there was money about, in London property, and there was cheap labour about, as a wave of immigration came from the north of england, scotland and wales to places like London. This wave of immigration was followed later-on by waves from the EU and does something to explain low UK productivity per person: the worse you run an economy, the more cheap labour is around to do pointless jobs.
About the same time, something was happening in Westminster which I know nothing about, nor about the blog & blogger. I found it while googling something else it. But it says that the Labour Party ceased to be interested in manufacturing and good manufacturing jobs, according to this link: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/12/24/the-labour-partys-city-problem/
Closing the Economy to make it more efficient
There's an online video of a coach party of unemployed South Italians getting off a coach in North Italy to chase, some of them, a single nursing job because unemployment is about 30% among people of their age and gender down south. Why so? The answer is in the crap shitbag goodfornothing string-em-up excuses for economists who the UK government favoured in the 1980s and who continue to influence the Monetary Policy Committee. The assumption, approved by all parties, is that if the economy goes too fast you have to put a spanner in the works to slow it down by raising interest rates. Never mind the problem alongside of consumer debt. Never mind that the economy does not simply sprout-up again next spring. There must be ways of reducing inflation that are better - like making production easier or more co-operative or reducing advertising for bad consumer debt and so reducing demand. There must be ways of reducing the pointless jobs in a boom so that more people get employed in productive jobs and there is less need for inward migration and overcrowding. But economics courses do not even recognise the problem. According the the Bundesbank or the textbook, interest rates so exchange rates must rise if there is a risk of inflation, and those jobseeker buses from South Italy to North Italy continue to run.
I should say for even-handedness that there are other similar policies. The policy of knocking down housing in order to reduce homelessness comes-round again and again, particularly in the UK in the 1969s and 70s, along with knocking down workshops and factories for car-parking space and zoning-out new ones under the planning act. The policy of trying to buy goods from badly-run countries in order to make those countries better-run is similar. It is called Development Studies.
DigressionOne:
Criticism was taught in English but not Economics
I don't know if colleges that allow two-subject degrees are keen on English and Economics, but I think that with skill and help from the the top of the organisation, it could be a good combination.
Students of English have to find something to say about a book, beyond "wow", or "seemed nice". A 1970s version of Keele Foundation Year brought people together on very loose terms for a tutorial, which is a great idea if it gets them acquainted and talking as hoped, but I doubt it did. They'd talk about something like a film or a book, and think of things to say. A tutor who worked at Keele at the time quoted those as an example. "There's not much you can do with 'wow' , or 'I liked Emma' ".
If I wrote an English essay that said something like "The Professor ... seemed nice", as I have done here, I would have trouble filling the space and showing clarity. I remember the feedback on an essay. "Try to enlarge your critical vocabulary".
We English students were on two-subject degrees. We had to think of something to say without time spent on theories of literary criticism, which is time well-saved; we made-up our own checklists of things to say about a book, particularly the beginning and the end which we had read, the points made in lectures or the preface to the Pengion edition, and in my case I found the role of the narrator a good bet, along with the way a group of readers' lacks or hopes at a time in history were fed by book; a book's popularity tells you about its readers.
To save more time, it became clear that there was one essay to do in a period of time during which we would study three or four authors, and we could get through exams by revising just the authors we had written-about - maybe even reading them all the way through and some of their other books and thinking of one or two different ways of talking about the books that this author wrote. So I would read several books by an author that I was interested in - usually one I liked - and stick to the beginning end and preface of authors I wanted to skip. Unfotunately I ended up writing an essay about Thomas Hardy who is a miserable waste of space and so had to read a few books of his and rehearse ideas and thoughts about why I disliked him, but tutors seemed OK with that; we didn't have to agree that every author was a great author. The journlaist Giles Cohren made a TV program about how much he disliked having to study Jane Austin (twice - at A level and Uni).
Then, to look posh, we got a nice set of vocabulary from reading Roland Barthes, who wrote about odd things like wrestling matches and came-up with his own jargon to describe them, so he's an easy read and can be slotted into a course like one more author to study. The tutor compared him to a 1950s writer called Richard Hoggart, very similar to the people who get Keele going in the 50s, just to put things in context, and he chose texts to suit the people in his tutorial group when allowed, so we mentioned Jean Ganet I think, and the issue of Eastenders shown that week, as well as the standard courses called "Augustans and Romantics" and "The Victorians" that had run for decades. One of them worked well with an anthology called "Augustans and Romantics", edited by Bloom and Trilling: "The purpose of the Oxford Anthology is to provide students with a selective canon of the entire range of English Literature from the beginnings to recent times, with introductory matter and authoritative annotation." I think those courses ended in 1987.
There were a few other books that would do as critical theory, or as books to read for their own interest - something from Freud; something from Virginia Wolfe and Simone do Beuvoir. I see on my shelf a book called "Introduction to Communication Studies" by Robert Fisk, which I might have read, It has long words that look like "Sausages" but I think are "Semiotics" and I might have read it at the time if I bought a copy, but, generally, theory came after a students' thoughts about original sources like an old book. Theory was a way to help a student develop ideas.
Looking online for Augustans and Romantics, I learn something new. Harold Bloom was the textbook writing supremo of his time. His name was on anthologies like Romantic Poetry and Prose that are published in New York by Oxford University Press, alongside anthologies of literary criticism for students in the USA who aren't allowed to have their own ideas; they can apply each official literary technique to each author in the official cannon of english literature, which is silly so students in the UK don't do it; that's not a proper university course, but economics departments were usually more constrained.
I guess there are two economic rules that goes like this:
Rule One.
The more controversial a subject; the safer the style of teaching. In any decade, there are plenty of countries where economics is taught, but only in the safest way to avoid being sacked to worse - maybe disappearing one night and never being seen again, These teachers are busy writing articles and buying textbooks just like other academics and they effect the way that the subject is taught everywhere.
Rule Two
The more useful a subject for earning a living; the more useless the students at criticizing. They do not live in the present; they want to get-on with a qualification..
Official schools of thought & critics
The official
canon of english literature
professor A
professor B
professor C
text A
loads of stuff learned by heart for essay deadlines & exams, then forgotten a year later because it has nothing to do with any graduate's life
text B
text C
I suppose there was a hope that if the official list of english history subjects or english literature is taught from the beginning, then students get to know more about the culture they've grown-up in. Slightly smug about it, but well-informed.
About the time I was at Keele (maybe earlier in other time zones), the emphasis came to include anything people wanted to study, using available tools, and led to the widely-mocked "Media Studies" courses. I have to explain that the title looked cool on a paperback in 1985, because it implied that we could un-pick and get the hang of whatever media we were interested-in, or whatever most people watched and read, or Milton. Take your pick. And that this is some vaccination against what Murdoch or Maxwell or the Radio 1 playlist committee do. We didn't imagine that a media studies paperback and a polytechnic course would lead to a job in the media. Nor prevent it either. It might even help a jobbing journalist or producer enjoy job a bit more and not turn into Alan Partridge (fictional) or the team from Nationwide (real) it, but there is a standard comment made about media studies courses that they are not a trade qualification.
I don't often see people criticize economics for not leading to a job, which is odd because there is no common job called economist and related jobs have "data" or "accountant" in the job title. An economics degree might help you think about the economy and maybe enjoy some financial jobs more if you do them anyway, but an economics degree is not a trade qualication. There is a connection shown on Unistats between being an economics graduate and having a job that pays very well up to about the age of 40, like finance director. There is an explanation which was very obvious in 1987 which was that a degree was a road to nowhere - to doing whatever you would have done anyway but a few years older and more educated. I guess that people who do economics degrees often know how to study for accountancy exams and get finance director jobs or set-up in business. That didn't mean that the rest of us had any idea - we just studied microecomics diagrams and excercises and the ISLM diagram and a revision class.
I doubt that many books about the media or criticism suggest that the course will help you get a job, but both my economics textbooks did that - even the loony microeconomics one that didn't mention data and tried to derive one economic rule of thumb from another as though they were laws of physics.
I have seen a comment made about economics a few times, which is that economics students are not allowed to read a proper book with individual ideas in it. Only textbooks. The specific comment is that the course does not cover Keynes as a book, with all its individuality. Students just get a shorthand diagram called the IS-LM curves by John Hicks, or something similar. I remember a tutor making that comment in 1987 at Keele, and the point is made 30 years later in http://www.rethinkeconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Economics-Education-and-Unlearning.pdf , page 19. So why are some economists aware of the problem but not able to change the course?
I hoped Economics would be a more interesting subject, even if it did attract more management trainees rather than cool people.
Economics students want to find something to say about an interest, like industrial collapse caused by government, un-affordable housing, apparently pointless jobs, or the strange statements that paid economists make like "Fashion contributes 26 billion pounds to the UK economy". Or "Heathrow's monopoly on new landing space contributes 26 billion pounds to the UK economy". Or "Amazon brings 26 billion good jobs to retail", or "26 billion jobs are at risk if we leave Europe". Or the statements that monetarist macro-economists made about how to manage the UK economy, which I will not dignify with a quote.
The pattern of debunkable economic claims was as true in the 1980s as later-on. For example the idea the a retailer brings jobs, when, in the retail market, one sale made in one place is likely to balance one sale not made in another place. You can elaborate. Some retailers are based in China and sell on ebay, possibly with a mail treaty that requires Royal Mail customers to pay for the import under some weird postal treaty mentioned in a Times article about Pritti Petel, Keele graduate, but otherwise hard to pin-down.. (Other retailers pay rent, VAT, and share government work by doing a huge amount of book-keeping and scheme-maintaining for the payroll, following employment law, paying liability insurance, and generally dedicating their lives to being a retailer undercut from China. Don't do it is my advice.)
To say something is pointless is a bit like saying you are against government cuts; it is a bit like saying "wow" or "I liked Emma". It begs questions that people should be able to unravel a bit further if interested. In the case of pointless jobs, most people who do them have some other option, if not an option that's quite as attractive or that's easy to jump to. And most of the jobs have some kind of private sector demand - the people who buy things that I personally don't, or the people who buy things because the market tends to provide gastro-pubs in a gentrified area with high rents. (Cuts beg questions about why the government doesn't have enough tax money coming-in, what, broadly, government should fund, and whether this particular bit of funding could be organised in other ways). So people who are interested in this kind of stuff ought to be good at un-ravelling the problems and suggesting solutions, but unfortunately, I don't think that economics courses help them do it.
I had hopes of the models we were taught. I thought that, some time in the course, we would use them as a way-in to discussing a problem like soup or cuts, but I don't remember any way of rehearsing this; we just had lectures, and could choose essays sometimes, and that was it. We also had exercises in how curves should move, and there are a lot of them in the back of the Laidler microeconomics textbook. Laidler writes that economics can be "a way of thinking", learned from practicing exercises
The one I studied was more like a statement quoted in the preface to a Carl Rodgers counseling book, which I haven't read, in which he talks about his sudden promotion to professor from being a practitioner. It can work like that in craft subjects, but seldom in psychology. He quotes someone putting a point to a US professor who replies "when you are a professor, you can make points like that".
LumpTwo:
I keep writing stuff about the 80s recession for some reason
This veers-off into reminiscence and needs a bit of editing - in fact the whole thing is just a ramble from here-on which is good because it covers unexpected things. I had not much idea what it was about when I started writing. The trouble is that I find it rather hard to read and sometimes make a point twice because I lost track.
Where were we?
In the newspapers, graph 19.2 was just a puzzling thing that happend to other people, but there was still a special slot on the TV news called "Today's Redundancies" - thousands every day at some forgotten household name gone defunct, with no chance that anything similar could open-up in its place. Usually someone would buy the brand to help flog imports in competition with things still made in the UK. Evan Davis' Made in Britain book mentions this as a great example of how people in the UK have intellectual property worth so much more than their or our ability to make things. For example, new Wedgewood plates have "made in China" written on them. Older ones have "made in England". I expect there are Chintz fabric designs that have gone back to China too.
In 1985 the biggest producer of boots with Doc Marten soles - Griggs with the Airwear brand - managed to take-over the Woollaston Vulcanisagtion Co-Operative, who held the Doc Martens brand. Next they stopped their competitors like Goerge Cox or G Brittan or that firm who's factory is still empty in the middle or Northampton, GB Hawkins, who used to make DMs with Astraunaut written on the pull tag. White's of Earl's Barton wrote Tredair on theirs, WJ Brooks probably wrote Provider, and there were probably others, working with the Airwair brand and a firm called Airwear Marketing until suddenly crowded-out. GB Brittan the Bristol army boot manufacturers were a big one. There was a growth in advertising as brands with cheap overseas suppliers spend their margins on the new idea of big brands, but all that stuff happenned down in London more, and a bit later-on.
I met someone who grew-up in a Hammersmith council estate during the late eighties. She could name the year in which branded goods became a must-have for children on the estate. This was a effect of the broken economy. As imports were so-much cheaper, it became easier to make a huge mark-up on an Chinese shoe if backed by a huge expenditure on advertising. If you watch the documentary The Kinky Boot Factory, you see Mr Pateman of WJ Brooks Devine making the same point at his small Department for Business funded stall at a Dusseldorf trade show while the one a few stalls along has a caberet. "They get the shoes into the UK for about £15 and all the rest of the price is advertising". This has a couple of nasty sides. One is that Mr Pateman had to close his factory, which had a wholesale price at least double, so his made-to-order shoes with delivery time of a few weeks were more expensive than the completion's off-the-shelf shoes. He had to pay for a welfare state and employment law after all. The other nasty side is that people who couldn't afford Nike and Addas at home of Microsoft and Adobe at work felt excluded. In some kind of social job in the 2000s I met an ex-childrens-home girl who said she got angry with one of her children. It had looked at something second-hand on a stall. She wasn't sure why she got so angry when she tried to explain to the child why not to buy second-hand things. One thing you see in any film of riots or crime is a lot of Addas-branded hoodies, which retail for over £50 each. In riots and chaos, some people go shoplifting the very items that put them out of work. A final point about "today's redundancies"
In the 1980s, the closures on the daily news are large companies every single day. Seldom retail companies. If a retail company looses market share, and people in the UK want to keep buying, then the money goes through a different channel. The idea of retail job losses or gains is different. These redundancies are part of a vast ingenious manufacturing industry that allows so many people to crowd a small island, and concerns them as it collapses. The point is seldom made, so worth stating another way. If a job moves to China, Keele graduates and their redundant parents cannot follow. Language, visas, air fairs, accommodation, and adjustment to living with strangers under a dictatorship are all barriers to a the free movement that economists sometimes talk about. It might be illegal in China for a UK unemployed person to go looking for work for all I know. And each country is different - Bangladeshis have a bit more freedom, but no welfare state and so people leave school early and have loads of children.
<DIGRESSION ON BANGLADESH> Bangladesh gets a special exemption from EU tariffs to undercut UK textile production prices, all negotiated with the EU by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, at UK taxpayers' expense, because those officials and ministers take a decision the economics students should know about, which is that a welfare state is a bonus for rich countries something to ignore when negotiating free trade deals with other countries, even if , in the case of Bangladesh, it turns out that Bangladeshi wages in textile factories fall rather than rise and UK textile factories near extinction. This is a general rant about a few decade's worth of policies but the problem in the early 1980s is a high exchange rate closing factories very very fast. </DIGRESSION ON BANGLADESH>
Most people in the college and their parents were effected. Middle-aged people who were forced to leave the labour market, and the teenagers and twenty-odds who were less able to join it, noticed the crisis most, particularly in industrial areas.
Newspaper editors and cowboy economists had strong opinions anyway, without having to notice things in the same way. But on the news and in the governing political party, Today's Redundancies were just part of the peripheral vision and not a reason for better monetary policy. The prime minister only wanted to understand opinions from certain kinds of economists anyway. If they needed an economics advisor, they went to the USA and there are exampels on the net somwehere of who they found.
The governing party had a favourite PR agency, Bell Pottinger, who's scapegoating technique is now well-known and on Wikipedia. In South Africa the scapegoat was "White Monopoly Capital"; in the UK Bell Pottinger tried hard to find anything anyone cared about, and I suppose they probably thought it was miners mentioned in speeches about the "enemy within".
Mrs Thatcher attempted a comedy sketch with the cast of Yes Minister in which she asked Sir Humphrey to abolish economists, but she wasn't the type to say that the whole darn thing had gone wrong; she didn't get enough sleep and she had started-off believing anything a right wing American economist told her. And when she pressed "delete" for so much of UK manufacturing, it wiped-out a lot of communities with a habit of voting labour, so there was a nasty un-stated reason not to complain. Just as the Labour party had ignored the problems of bulldozing inner cities in order to concentrate their supporters into council housing built by Pollson and partners a decade or two earlier. Then, events like the Falklands War and the extra-ordinary support of newspaper proprietors helped her government win elections until the other parties became clones.
How government economics advisers caused a recession
The exchange-rate hike in 1979 closed the best factories that exported most.
The policy of hiking-up interest rates to reduce inflation had existed before and it still taken seriously now. It was called "monetary policy" in economics textbooks and among pundits, writing in the financial pages of newspapers, just before sport and TV.. But this was extreme enough to make the front page. I think that real interest rates after inflation went from 7½% to 15%, or there was some dramatic change: I remember newspaper pictures of the chancellor with his red dispatch box and some giant huge interest rate printed over it, saying "I am a mug: I choose to pay too much for government debt and to wreck this economy" and that is how he held down a job for his boss..
Money from around the world surged-in as people bought any safe investment, like bank accounts, but more likely government stock from this government so stupid that it voluntarily paid too much interest for its government bonds in order to put labour voters out of business. The tide of money hiked-up the exchange rate so that nobody in the UK could sell anything any more, unless it was within the UK, and without competition from imports. Politicians pundits and newspaper owners weren't effected, but the rest of us were.
My dad had to stop taking on new business about the time that the closure of the MG car factory was on the news. My did did consumer credit, and MG did exports, but in this recession both closed at the same time. A new UK textbook spells-out the start of the factory-closing process in detail. The worst factories that only made things for the home market were able to stagger-on a bit longer, proving, first, that a concerned home market helps manufacturing, and second that the standard account of the 1980s is wrong. The "battle against inflation resulted in the closure of many inefficient factories, shipyards and coal pits", according to Wikipedia, which doesn't mention the exchange-rate hike directly. That's the kind of discrepancy economics students ought to study. Faults in official truth. If you google the problem you find two different views, one on Wikipedia and one on Economics Help that says the fiddled exchange rate closed factories. The Economics Help view is the true one.
The Servis washing machine factory, that made reliable washing machines, closed while the Hotpoint factory carried-on.
The MG car factory at Abingdon closed in about 1979, but the one making the Morris Ital survived to make the next model, as part of the same group of companies
Reliant Scimitars - both models - and Bond Buggies ceased production, but the Reliant Robin carried-on production at the same Tamworth factory.
Steelite stacking crockery for caterers was still made, but a UK factory closed. Things like Staffordshire Figurines and Spode continued in production I think. I remember seeing it in shop windows and taking bus journeys past the Spode factory,
Personal computer manufactures Acorn, Dragon, and Osborn all closed, while main-frame manufacturers GEC and ICL continued. (A censored anecdote in the official history of Reading University is that staff would have liked to take their million pound ICL computer to the end of a peer and push it over. They didn't. They donated it to Wellington College. But you get the idea that mainframe computers with their leasing and maintenance contracts were worse value than desktop ones bought from a new breed of companies, tens or hundreds or times cheaper).
The Wikipedia account comes from some different source to reality: an idea of how to shock the habit of inflation out of the US labour market called something like Rational Expectations, re-written into a kind of Geoffrey Archer plot regardless of facts. An odd idea, rather like the recent Quantitative Easing, which I don't quite understand - the sort of thing you go on an economics course to find out more about, or, if you are the minister or civil servant pushed to do it by a prime minister, the sort of thing you hope won't go massively wrong and close down a big chunk of the economy and the prospects of regions and generations.
Two policies that seem intuitively wrong
Quantitative Easing in 2006+ seemed to do OK. I don't quite understand it. I don't understand why printing money works now in the UK but didn't work in Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe. If the policy works I don't know why it isn't done more, to pay off the national debt. Maybe the economy would have de-flated otherwise. I know that public works mop-up surplus capacity in the economy, and there are unemployment statistics that give a clue when to try the idea or when to run it down. I don't know how anyone knows whether Quantitive Easing will help prevent deflation and cut the national debt, which are good things, or cause massive inflation and make it hard for the remains of the economy to remain, which are bad things. As in Weimar Germany of Zimbabwe. Maybe there is an expert who knows. Someone who has done an economics degree.
Monetary Policy from 1979-2009 was as weird as Quantitative Easing. Intuitively daft. It was also a crisis from day one, in 1979, but the governing class of tabloid proprietors and government grandees seemed to support it anyway. I don't even know the official name for this idea of hiking-up the exchange rate and closing factories. Maybe it was the Medium Term Financial Strategy, which sounds like a cover-up name. Maybe some supporters hoped it would close-down loads of factories in Labour-voting areas and free labour to work in services in Conservative-voting areas. If many people hoped this, I guess it would have leaked, and show in the facial expressions and tone of voice of ministers interviewed years later. I do not know of any such leaks. There is a series of video interviews, shown on TV at the time of Mrs Thatcher's death, of the ministers who had to endure her as an awful boss before she sacked them. I don't know how to view it, but people who have watched a lot of TV over time might confirm to you that this is plausible, even if you can't get hold of the video interviews. The ex-ministers' tones of voice and facial expressions suggest that they want to be given a chance to apologise, and explain why they were so bad at getting-rid of disaster prime ministers before loosing their chance because she got rid of them. James Prior, does apologise. He says that once you have closed so much of industry, it is very hard to get it back. Francis Pym, says that the government should have given-up the manifesto pledge of a radical economic policy on day one, because it wouldn't work in a recession. Ian Gilmour, describes Mrs Thatcher's performance at a Dublin EU summit at which the other leaders ignored her and she only got some token concession. Ruefully, he admits that he persuaded her not to resign. His idea was to tell the public that the meeting had been a victory, so that a loyal press could agree. None of them were sure how much the tabloid press supported them and voters took note of the tabloid press, but the idea worked. Unlike the monetarist economic experiment, but the ghosts of those newspaper points of view remain. Everyone now agrees that the disaster of 1980s economics was a success, because the newspapers said so. <note to self>gap in the text here between one bit and another</note to self> The US economy, where this idea was made up, was very very big, with fewer imports and exports in proportion; a shock to interest rates worked more through reduced investment and increased spending as peoples' mortgage costs went-up. That's the country that monetarist economists inhabited. Their proposed shock would have another effect as the exchange-rate rose and imports flooded-in, but it could be ignored in the short term or patched-up with some shrugs to the worst-effected, or maybe some tariffs and subsidies and a bit of favouritism in government purchasing. I doubt the system worked - there is a rust belt in the USA and voters switched to Trump in order to prevent another free trade deal called TTIP - but economics is not the same in every country, and the country I inhabited was the UK.
Lump Three:
Recessions effect the colleges that teach about recessions
The new UK government in 1979 got their radical economic policies second hand from the USA, and the graph above was the result. The choice of advisers wasn't as stupid as it looks in hindsight, but it was almost as stupid. The idea of managing demand to grow an economy was obviously not working, and there were not many ideas in economics textbooks about increasing supply. There had been a decade of inflation. And American economists sounded so convincing when they talked about money supply and radical solutions that an opposition party looking for idea would pick-up those ideas, even if they were nothing to do with the supply of goods. Nothing to do with making factory work more interesting and the products more easy to buy.
There is something odd about a lot of UK politicians and civil servants and BBC editors, as in The Times and other publications like James Bond films. They apply it to defence procurement as well. They like things to come from the USA. Not Canada; not anywhere else but the USA.
A lot of economic ideas did seem to come from the USA. That's where the ideas in the main textbooks came from. There was a huge single market to sell textbooks for courses that helped teenagers avoid consciption. They would study anything. I remember there was even a scheme for awarding points towards a degree to a teenager who travelled to Europe, so a year-off could be a reason to avoid conscription.
The same textbooks helped lecturers avoid the McArthy / Todd committees and unfair dismissals, because teaching from the textbook was safe, and hard for anyone to complain about. I think I repeat this point somewhere further down the page. These same lecturers had to research and write and have big ideas if they wanted to advance their careers, but they also had to have such safe and boring, technical, pointless ideas that nobody would read about them to consruct a dismissal. The most exciting idea I remember from lectures was to tax polluters. Not very exciting, but among the ideas of the Kirmit-men it was the most exciting thing going. National Insurance was completely off the scale - way too exciting for the Kirmit men.
In order to make things look open and academic, they had competing schools of thought between certain famous US professors, so that US lecturers could explain why the two schools disagreed and look as though they reported on an open democratic process. A bit like this way of teaching English
Official schools of thought & critics
Official canon of english literature
professor A
professor B
professor C
text A
loads of stuff learned by heart for essay deadlines & exams, then forgotten a year later because it has nothing to do with anything in any graduate's life.
text B
text C
I don't think US economics went as far as three professors and three schools of thought; I think it was just two.
Professor A.
There were mid-atlantic professors.
They avoided saying anything controversial in the US, and anything controversial in the UK, rather like the music that was played on Radio 1.
Smug and well-paid for coporate consultancy and keen to pretend they hadn't head of the welfare state. I don't know how they held-down jobs as economics teachers while pretending not to have heard of the welfare state, but I guess their US students faced the draft and fighting in Vietnam if they walked-out of a course while their UK stduents had less of the textbook market and nodded-along.
Mid-Atlantic professors acknowledged that demand management could help the economy, in a recession, and if it was the USA in 1936 with very few imports or exports to trouble the diagram. They thought of public spending like the sprinkler systems their gardners used on their lawns in a drought, ready to turn off when the weather got back to normal. There was a thing called the Phillips Curve which used to show a trade-off between inflation caused by too much sprinkling and unemployment caused by too little, but this relationship had ceased during the oil crisis. By this time the smug people were so well-paid and irrelevant that I don't remember them being quoted much or anyone knowing their names.
Professor B.
And there were US monetarists who thought the Keynsians were reds under the beds, and that industry needed to be closed for no apparent reason, under the pretext of preventing inflation. On that pretext they would find a way to over-value the currency and close manufacturing. They are still respected among the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, among MPs and in the press. There are hints from the Bank of England that it expects to nudge-up interest rates soon as a way of reducing inflationary pressures caused by high employment.
Neither group of US economists ran tutorials. You can tell by searching for videos of them. For example David Laidler wrote my obviously awful micro-economics textbook, so he must have been a bit retarded or very carefully selected for his ignorance.
He was selected by the Institute of Economic Affairs (more about them is on Sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_of_Economic_Affairs ) to give a lecture about the Chicago School. There's another one on Youtube. I've watched about a minute of one in which he says that there were concerns about whether capitalism could survive, in some unspoken way that he understood it like capitalism without an NHS, but there's no chance to find-out because he talks in a particular way.
He talks v-e-r-ys-l-o-w-l-y a-s t-h-o-u-g-h h-e h-a-s l-e-a-r-n-i-n-gd-i-f-f-i-c-u-l-t-i-e-s. So if you were on his awful year two course in micro-economics at Western Ontario University in the 1970s, and even if there were some opportunity to talk to him like a tutorial, h-e w-o-u-l-d t-a-l-k t-o-os-l-o-w-l-y f-o-r a c-o-n-v-e-r-s-a-t-i-o-n t-o w-o-r-k . Students wouldn't get a chance to talk back. He would not learn anything from students. This is a real learning difficulty compared to other academics who run tutorials. And he seems not to mind; he is p-a-i-d b-y t-h-e h-o-u-r, n-o-t t-h-e i-d-e-a.
I didn't spot any good ideas in Econometrica. I don't know if anyone has ever read it, cover to cover. I guess the most exciting story is "gentleman discovers curve".
I haven't checked videos of modern LSE professors, but they might be the same.
They beat Edinburgh , University College London and Manchester professors to get the extreme worst end of economics students' feedback on Unistats. (LSE course are the least popular of any college except another government favourite: University of the Arts). Usually, if a course completes, students don't use the bottom half of the scale but one heading they score 37%. I don't think economic problems usually need a lot of maths to address them. For example, these bright, precocious, selected students ought pretty-much to have taught themselves just after sitting in a room together, but that's not a mathmatical response. Anyway there is some maths in economics, and these are the figures you need to know about the UK's leading economists.
LSE Economics degree student feedback, checked January 2018 63% Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course 77% Staff are good at explaining things 60% Staff have made the subject interesting 74% The course is intellectually stimulating 61% My course challenged me to achieve my best work 66% My course provided me with opportunities to explore ideas or concepts in depth 65% My course has provided me with opportunities to bring information & ideas together from different topics 53% My course has provided me with opportunities to apply what I have learnt 50% I have received helpful comments on my work 37% The criteria used in marking have been clear in advance 59% Marking and assessment has been fair 61% Feedback on my work has been timely
When I wrote that English Literature could be taught as a grid of what professors think about texts I exaggerated by writing "professor" instead of "critic", but in economics departments, both the people allowed to have opinions in the textbooks were professors who looked like Kirmit the frog, who had climbed up a controlled career path and were well-paid for consultancy work and academic jobs just s long as they didn't say it was all silly. They pretended that they had an impartial, politics-proof science with journals as respectable as The Lancet for medics, but medical science is often based on fact and stats alongside status; it aims to be based on fact. Economic science was more based on status and ability to avoid criticism by being so boring and distant and controlled that, in 1980s Keele, students had no way to argue-back and the same was true of journalists and anyone else such as voters. The much-used book Microeconomics by David Laidler is proof to outsiders. It proves that economic laws agree with each other and neither knows nor cares whether they agree with how human beings run markets or public services - in fact the Samualson article defining a Public Good is simply an insult to any such idea. As a student I was more immersed in the subject; I hoped it lead somewhere.I tried buying a more advanced textbook, because the the macroeconomics tutor did not seem to have read the current standard one. I bought "Macroeconomics - an introduction to Keynsian Neo-Classical Controversies" - to find that it doesn't get any better, even in the middle of an economic crisis with a quarter of the workforce not working.
One economist who started in Leicester, UK, and moved to teach in the USA was welcomed as a UK government advisor, because he'd taught in the USA. 365 UK economists who taught in the UK wrote a letter to The Times condemning government economic policy were not welcome as government advisers. The person who wrote my awful micro economic textbook was bad enough to advise a bad government, but he was Canadian, so he wouldn't do; he remained a textbook-writer and "one of the foremost scholars of monetarism", it says on Wikipedia.
They were not just supposed experts, but they were the people who caused a whole list of things that nearly closed Keele University and did close my father's business and effected everyone in the UK one way or another, so there was some discussion to be had about why the culprits were paid and treated as experts. It's all new territory for bad economics courses. They usually embellish the X-shaped diagrams with roof-like triangles and satellite-dish shapes for micro-economics. They usually move-on to demand management for macro-economics, finishing with a kind of charting exercise in which some of the rules-of-thumb are combined as a chart with lots of dotted lines and that's called "modelling".
Not that Keele ran a bad economics course in the early 80s: small groups of students tried to solve problems with a tutor, and learn theory along-side, but times have changed. I think the areas of study were innovation and encouragement for UK industry - a bespoke course that re-appeared for a year in 1987, overseas development and world trade, and a bespoke macro course about funding the welfare state over decades including pensions. There were student reps on the staff Senate, and one or two non-economists had been hired to teach economics, which can only be a good thing and lead to better teaching. The senate was one of the two groups that was meant to control the organisation, alongside a "Council" of bigwigs and of course mainly the government funding organisation and people who had got jobs managing the place. Good courses were replaced by whatever was cheap and available on the shelf in my year. <note to self> I loose the thread a bit here </note to self> An over-riding principal is that there has to be a better private sector to provide jobs and pay taxes, and there has to be more clarity about the deal on things like pensions. There's not a huge amount in the way of business tips, which is wise because educationalists aren't in business. All good stuff, slipped-in to a course far earlier than at the more mathematical full-time courses in other colleges. I just wish they had built-in some kind of access to self-employed work as part of the course, because I fell-out of the end without a job
a third less money & no explanation
Every 18 year-old with a chance of a college place applied, just to stay off the dole. One of them shared a hitchiking lift from Keele - he must have asked the driver to stop at Keele Service Station - and asked for ideas after failing some exams. "I want todo Geography", he said. "Geography is crap, but it gets you into university". I remember the obscure foundation year course - the one that people didn't usually apply for - was packed on day one, with students like me who the college wasno longer paid to teach, with those staff who remained on the payroll, and very little else if it could cut in any way. I presume the college ran-updebts just like central government; it sold something called The Turner Collectionin the 1990s. I'm very glad they kept going rather than put-up a sign saying "we regret that due to unforeseen circumstances, all staff are redundant and all courses are cancelled". That's the kind of thing people hoped to get away from.
Cyclical spending, I remember from A-level, is anything that can be cut in an emergency like some of the back-office staff, building maintenance, new computers, or books. My opening quote "if you turn to your textbooks..." could not have happened because academic staff didn't have recent textbooks. I noticed that academic staff were rare, but they were only cut 10%.. Spending on new books or computers was near zero. The registrar was made redundant. The Vice Chancellor's job was confirmed when the college chose not to merge with a technical college down-town, probably because it would save no money, but there was some co-operation on redundancies so a lecturer could be made redundant from one job and emerge, surprised, teaching at the other college instead of getting a pay-out. Other staff chose unpaid leave without replacement [Tribe, 2014, p3, footnote 8]. Meanwhile the Vice Chancellor got another job anyway, and a new one was hired, who managed to save money by doing his job as badly as possible. I saw him bellowing at students, telling them they wouldn't get degrees unless they picked-up litter, and I overheard bits of similar phone calls to staff. It would be good to know if part of the brief was to keep economics teaching boring, and the same thing was happening in other colleges, but this kind of stuff tends not to be written-down. The same mistakes have to happen over and over again
Cheap teaching: make-do & mend
While posts are left unfilled, a 64 year-old head of department who I will call The Professor teaches flat-out to fill the gaps. In English, the generation of professors who taught slot-together A-level textbook courses (plus a bit to look like Uni) has ended and a new generation allow students to do something more. English is the cheapest subject and so is allowed to expand on the advice of funders. Economics is a middling-priced subject and still has the older generation in charge.
Problem-solving workshops in the economics department are abandoned for ever, leaving cheap lectures and cheap things that are almost the same, called a "class" in whatever subject an available lecturer is prepared to teach from one end of a classroom to dozens of bored-looking students.
There was nothing to make stupid lectures cheaper than interesting lectures, but something about university economics departments - and the professor's own own past - suggested that the most obviously stupid stuff that students should walk-out of or get a refund for enduring... that stuff was considered the core of the subject and money was found to teach it, even if money for teaching more-or-less ran-out by the end of the course.
In summery: Good course: problem solving workshop with a very high ratio of staff to students.
Problems determine what theories are called-on, so irrelevant or wrong theory is not called-on. Bad course: weatherman addresses a room full of unknown bored faces, delivering some bit of obviously wrong theory that none of them will remember a year after graduating because it has nothing to do with them or things that they or the weatherman are interested in.
By 1986, the plan was to share teaching with the technical college down-town, but that plan fell-through. So we students saw a lot of the few teaching staff left at Keele, staring at them from one end of a room and trying to work-out what was going-on.
The Professor, professor of Economics at Keele & possibly the only nice US economist
He was unusually nice for a 1980s economist, a survivor who taught whatever was in the classic textbook along with anecdotes about changing jumper designs and warm beer and revision classes with a broiler chicken example from decades-old notes. A man who used to do anecodes about "this technological age" in the consultancy work on job-seeking that he published for the State of Colorado. By the 1980s he dropped that style except for anecdotes about Ford of Detroit, who paid for his Ford Foundation scholarship to the UK, so he still launched into anecdotes about the wonders of Ford of Detroit even though students were more interested in Ford of Dagenham.
The man who said "we have to teach this stuff in order to call this an economics degree" in a revision lecture on ISLM diagrams. The tutor who didn't learn how to do a tutorial, but approved of tutorials in theory, just as long as he didn't have to do them.
The same man who hired new staff with a non-economist background, for sanity. Young teachers to teach about innovation, third world development, and more while offering study leave for those who weren't yet published authors to become so, and tried to get lecturers to hop-about between different jobs to pick-up ideas.
The same father-figure of a man who used my taxes (or my mum and dad's taxes if he believed in the "transfer payments" idea of what the state does rather than the more obviously true one of being a national insurance company) to lie to me about the scumbags who had destroyed my dad's business and the jobs of the parents of so-many other people in the room. So I would rather write a warm obituary about my own dad than this dad.
The professor is also past caring what anyone thinks about him - he is long dead - so I used to quote his name, but that might make this post read as though it's about him, and not about all economics courses and the 1980s destruction of parts of the UK economy. If you've been on another economics course and read about this one, it will look pretty thin because this was a 40 week course taught by a staff team of about 4 with two thirds the going-rate per student for a budget, and it was taught before the internet made more possible.
Somewherwe right near the end I might put a link to the man's obituaries, because they explain how he spent years toeaching under threat of the sack if he did anything unauthodox, like giving an opinion about the economy. Loads of economics professors all round the world have to teach like this. There's no way that anyone can blame them for it. The fault is with people in more free countries who copy the habit without realising where it comes from.
Coldwar economists were the sort of people who do well after original thinkers get the sack. I expect there are a lot like that are teaching in Turkey now, and a Turkish student can update this list about tactical, careerist people who work well with their funders. Government social work contractors are a bit like this - full of people who have never done anything wrong because they have never done anything.
In 1950s America they had swept-back hair which was meant to make them look highbrow but also made them look like Kirmit the Frog. They had heavy serious spectacles. They pretended not to know about social insurance, or demand management, or anything that might upset their funders and these professors didn't mind lying to their students and writing things that were fairly obviously false like Samualson's theory of the public good.
<DIGRESSION ON JOURNALS IN THE 2010s>
Academic journals often not very good. I found a good article in something called Industrial Relations Bulletin, or some such, but don't remember a single good article being quoted from Econometrica. Maybe the editorial team are not every good at economics. They published an article about themselves in 2004, long after free blogs had eliminated most of the cost of printing a journal. $32 was their marginal cost to print and post each of six issues a year, apart from writing, editing, and other fixed costs, and funded by typical fees to libraries of $500 for an institutional log-on and printed copies. </DIGRESSION ON JOURNALS IN THE 2010s>
Back in 1950s, an anecdote about University of Colorado noticed no books in the bookshop, except textbooks and one exception called "Life of Gandhi". So there weren't many general-interest books to inform tutors, or not if they shopped at the college book shop.
There were no tutorials to inform tutors. The same anecdote quotes the professor saying that students "to some extent had to be spoon-fed". Another explanation is that tutors did not want to meet students in tutorials for fear of allegations being made against them of being a communist, so tutors did not learn anything from students. They wrote the most pretentious algebra possible, to make themselves look scientific in their boring articles in Econometrica. while using the biggest possible variations of their names to get noticed, like people who get credits at the end of a film "Catering: Hireme P Fatburger"; "Pointless algebra article in Econometrica: Professor Hireme P Fatburger".
Paul Samualson was quoted for the more gentle bit ignorant school of thought, and another lot for the theories of money which were a cover for closing industry. Theories of money are a convenient subject, in decades when economists are sacked for origninal thought, because there is a lot of meaningless data about the money supply. Pointless data - a bit like trying to measure the weight of clouds or the distances between stars - but good for a well paid career just as long as no government is daft enought to take your economic advice, because these economic ideas were meant for economists' careers, not for governments and voters. You can tell by the economists' names. Names as big as footballers' haircuts. Not Paul Samualson, but Professor Paul A. Samualson.
The Professor was happy writing "Les" on his office door, even if he didn't hold tutorials, work from original sources, or suggest conflicting points of view beyond the odd mimed shrug. Maybe his ghost gets the last laugh.
Teaching economics is not a lot of fun. In a subject where theory is taught before use, students yawn and "face time", is used to drill the theory into student heads, useful or not, welcome or not, so they pass the exams. Some of it is so excruciatingly pointless and boring that it has to be drilled-in several times, or at least that is the tradition described in the preface to the awful micro-economics text book. Thirty years later, I still haven't quite brought myself to read David Laidler's Introduction to Economics, second edition, cover to cover and I bought it second-hand, unread. You could harvest some web data about second hand books sold on the internet to see what kinds of books are most-often sold un-read. I guess that micro-economics textbooks for university students are high on the list.
Something about Laidler's Introduction to Economics just seems wrong, and any readers' mind naturally wonders to ask why? What's going-on? Who writes this stuff? It is like trying to remember the lyrics to Ra-Ra Rasputin; the wierdness distracts from attempts to remember, while the naffnes discourages, and then some other wierdness crops-up like "isoquants" or a curve we are meant to remember from the previous chaptor, and the whole farce lurches from the simplistic to the difficult-because-irritatiing. So we have several variables to add to the equation: puzzlment (P), entitlement to lecture and choose syllabus (E), and the justice of wasting students' time in this way (J). Entitlement and Justice are overlapping versions of the same thing, and both negative quantities. On the other side of the equation are ways that the industry keeps going. It is full of people who agree with each other, and so think they must be right. That is the gist of Laidler's equations: there are people and rules of thumb that agree with each other so they don't care if they agree with the facts. Like faith groups and political parties. The X-shapes on the diagrams are symbols rather than graphs of real numbers. The truth could be a + shape or a cloudier-shape made up of much thicker broader lines, but in Laidler's book we have an X.
In English, the poet Milton is just as bad, but easier to skip. A bit like the lyrics of Freddie Mercury, or the words in Ra Ra Rasputin but we got him over-with pretty fast and the tutor did ask something like "why do we study Milton? - there are no characters in it, no ideas in it, and there's no humour in it (except unintentional humour like ' is this a cloud? - no it is not a cloud.')." And then we moved-on, wasting only a week instead of half the course for a year spent on untested microeconomic theory.
Passnotes:
preparing to teach a tutorial / class
A rule of thumb: economists do not predict recessions
There is an rule of thumb: economists do not predict recession. This could be because economists studied in a boom. Their textbooks put all the messy stuff about recession and economic mess-ups in the background. At the end of the course, there are jobs around and these students are happy to go-on and teach this stuff. Other people studied economics in a recession while their college was short of cash and just taught whatever was cheapest to teach, to the largest possible number of students, using a pre-recession textbook in my case, and students sat and scowled-back, never to think about economics again after graduating. They loose all patience with the subject and forget about it - there are no jobs to be had teaching it anyway. You'll meet them serving you coffee or working in social services or teaching english as a foreign language in Mongolia or doing something self-employed. Maybe they get a public-funded job, like a lot of Keele graduates, and may rise to become director of traffic for a region or something like that. That is my economic theory, ready for publication in any journal on the Keele List. Economic theories have a bumpy ride in the USA where a lot of the textbooks and journals are written. The idea that a government can build motorways or the Hoover Dam or somehow try to influence the economy in a recession is a big deal there. Doing it is fine but getting it into textbooks is a big deal. A textbook was boycotted for saying any such thing, then Samuelson's textbook said it in such pretend-scientific language that his textbook sold. There would be another bumpy ride for any economist who wrote a textbook about social insurance systems and the UK NHS so - no surprise - they don't. Or write a careful criticism of what the public sector had done well or badly when trying to plan vital parts of production during the war. A lot of them in the US were of a generation that knew about that, first hand, from emergency war-time planning of the US arms industry, but they didn't want to write about it. The standard textbook has a big section on micro-economics, then a shorter section on the macro-economics of demand, and nothing about what the UK Department for Business or development agencies do well or badly; there is nothing in the textbook about macro-economic supply. Or just four pages in Begg.
Where were we?
Oh we were talking about a new theory and whether to get it published: the theory that economists don't predict recession. If I was an american economics professor and put that into algebra, maybe with a curve, that might get into Econometrica, but that's another problem with Econometrica. I bet they prefer articles from a proper professor with serious specs, and to be a US professor when people respected Econometrica you had to pretend you hadn't heard of the welfare state or anything like that and not profess anything that anyone would want to know, or you'd get a summons from the McArthy / Todd Committees and then your boss would get help from a special department at the CIA to organise unfair dismissal without a reference. A long sentence but true. Apart from the boycott of an economics textbook that mentioned macro-economics and demand management, there were a number of schemes to dismiss mis-fits from teaching in the postwar USA.
By JENNIFER HAMILTON OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Posted Mar 9, 2003 at 3:19 AM, as edited by the Herald Tribune (shorter version in the Los Angeles Times)
BOULDER, Colo. --
During the height of the 1950s Red Scare, University of Colorado philosophy professor Morris Judd was fired amid rumours he was a communist. He never worked in education again. Half a century later, Judd has learnt that the man responsible was Robert Stearns, the university’s president at the time, who spied on his faculty for the FBI, according to newly declassified documents.
In a telephone interview from his home in Sun City, Ariz., Judd said he’ll never forgive Stearns. “He was responsible for my leaving teaching,” Judd said. “He attacked me personally, saying I was a dull teacher, then that I was incompetent, all the while because there were rumours that I was a radical and a communist.” To this day, Judd, 86, refuses to say whether he belonged to the party. Stearns died in 1977, and his relatives have declined comment. During the height of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, it was not unusual to see allegations of political disloyalty made without evidence to accompany them, said Ellen Schrecker, who studies the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for communist sympathisers. “We seem to be discovering that this kind of thing was going on at several campuses,” said Schrecker, a history teacher at Yeshiva University in New York. She said many campuses during the Cold War had an FBI contact person, such as the secretary of a dean. The revelations about Stearns are contained in reports that were kept in a bank vault until late last year, when the university’s Board of Regents released them under the threat of a lawsuit by the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder. The newspaper also filed open-records requests seeking FBI documents. The papers show that Stearns ordered a probe by two former FBI agents to investigate the faculty for subversives at the urging of the Colorado Legislature after it was revealed that CU professor David Hawkins belonged to the Communist Party. In a 1954 interview, Stearns assured the FBI that most professors with “pinkish influences” had left the campus by 1951, according to the declassified transcripts. “I have kept them (the FBI) informed on each of these men so they know well what they are doing and where they have gone,” Stearns told FBI interviewers. Within six months of the report’s completion, the university terminated Judd and Irving Goodman, a non-tenured chemistry professor and two-time Guggenheim fellow. The CU regents agreed to retain Hawkins. The report accused Goodman of lying about having left the Communist Party. It said Judd belonged to a Marxist literary society. When Stearns dismissed Judd, he accused him of “pedestrian-ism,” meaning he was a boring teacher. Judd took a job as office manager at his father-in-law’s salvage yard in Greeley. The documents’ release has prompted CU English professor Paul Levitt to call for the renaming of the Stearns award, which honours outstanding faculty. “It seems to me you don’t protect the institution by engaging in a violation of civil liberties and human rights,” Levitt said. “Stearns could very well have resigned. He could have said no.” Stearns supporters called his actions understandable, given Cold War fears that communist sympathisers were leaking U.S. security secrets to the Soviet Union. “I’m not trying to justify what he did or those times,” university archivist David Hays said. “But in those times he was tap dancing, he was looking for room to manoeuvre.” In a letter to the CU faculty newspaper last month, alumnus Dorothy Smith of Seattle said Stearns made CU one of the first schools to accept Japanese-Americans released from World War II internment camps. He also opened his home to African-American guest lecturers when no one in town would offer them a room. “He supported a variety of liberal student organisations as long as he could,” alumnus and Boulder resident John Jacus said. “And only when one of them was exposed as a front for the former Young Communists League was he no longer able to allow that particular organisation on campus.”
An obituary in the Denver Post added some similar detail after interviewing Paul Levitt who researched what a 126 page freedom-of-information request revealed.
"About 50 people on campus either left “out of disgust” or because they worried that they, too, were under suspicion", said Levitt.
The 126-page file on the CU investigations was hidden in aBoulder bank vault, so few people knew the details of whom university officials suspected or how the investigations were carried out by two FBI agents brought in by Stearns.
The report showed that people’s personnel, medical,financial and academic records were searched by the agents, Levitt said. Those under suspicion were followed, former CU regent Jim Martin said.
It was in 2002 that Levitt and Martin pushed to have thereport released. The Boulder Daily Camera also sued to have it released, Levitt said.
Levitt described the charges against CU faculty, staff and students as full of “libel, innuendo, gossip, rumor and guilt by association.”
That's the professor's previous employer. He was also summoned to the Todd / McCarthy committee hearings but managed to hold down his job long enough to continue calmly to the UK, rather than have "constructive dismissal over alleged bad teaching followed by work at family salvage yard" on his CV. Although the professor had been through that once before, working "briefly as a docker, before ... twoyears as an accountant at his father's furniture manufacturing firm in Los Angeles", according to an obituary by his daughter. Current students will have teachers from simlar backgrounds, particularly at school but in higher education as well. At school, it's reported on TV that the Harris acadamy chain sacks staff and pupils who don't boost Ofstead results, and there are widespread similar reports that I haven't googled. At universities, the power lies with people who get power and pay: pay rates of vice chancellors are widely reported as a scandle. There are people from other countries where political control of universities is tighter, like Turkey, who get jobs in the UK but have the same sense of how to hold-down a job as they did in Turkey. There are people who worked for nutter con-men like the Professor Nigel Piercey at Warwick and Swansea who are looking for ways of holding-down a job. So any economics student has to interpret their lecturers' opinions as an act of diplomacy, of stating things that are hard to complain-about, of calm. Even if untrue. That's what the professor did did.
The professor's ridiculously diplomatic answer to a question was this: "We used to believe on Keynsian solutions; now we believe on monetarist solutions", and it was addressed to people like the Todd and McArthy committee members, and to their local Machiavelli boss, Mr Stearns, who was the professor's boss when he worked in Colorado. In theory it was given to the student who asked the question, but, as they say in police stations, anything you say may be taken as evidence against you. The experience might have been in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, but it still effected his style of teaching in the UK in the 1980s, such as sticking to textbooks and not running tutorials. Someone asked another question about why monetarist economists were doing so much damage, and got a reply in mime: "It'll be like a cold shower. [shrug] That's what they say - the people who believe in it". That was as close as the professor got to saying how we could argue-back against a disaster of an economic policy that effected most people in the room. Maybe, decades later, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, he would have mimed a shrug and said "well: Gordon Brown opened their HQ in 2004 and talked about light-touch banking law". Which is not a good thing to hear when you have committed years of your life to spend working for no dosh in order to study something like this, and big lumps of taxpayer money as well. Even if you would have been on the dole otherwise and you do get a £3,000 maintenance grant with free tuition. I mean: would you work for £3,000 a year to listen to that?
Oh I am no expert but this is what google tells me about the event
The Rt Hon Gordon Brown, MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: “I would like to pay tribute to the contribution you and your company make to the prosperity of Britain. During its one hundred and fifty year history, Lehman Brothers has always been an innovator, financing new ideas and inventions before many others even began to realise their potential. And it is part of the greatness not just of Lehman Brothers but of the City of London, that as the world economy has opened up, you have succeeded not by sheltering your share of a small protected national market but always by striving for a greater and greater share of the growing global market.”
Getting back to the 1980s, there was a pompous group of economists, and there was a pompous and rabid group of economists in the USA who's ideas had more to do with holding-down a job as an economics teacher than anything more useful.
Samuelson the textbook-writer is one of the saner US economists compared to the rival school of thought, who Thatcher chooses as economic advisers. My professor is one of the saner ones too - a civil rights activist with an interest in Pete Seeger and ending the Vietnam War, who had joined an odd political party in his youth that sounded communist to the average american. Well it would do. It was called the The Communist Party USA, but he was a civil rights activist, not a plotter paving the way for tanks. The McArthy and Todd Committees must have thought so too because they got round to him quite late, after he'd got a job at Keele and showed interest in the Pedestrians Association, the Fabian Society and one of the mainstream political parties. The picture is Professor Paul Samuelson and I had Professor Les Fishman, but they all have the same high-brow haircut and serious specs. In the states these people wear suits, and when they move to the UK they buy tweed. The theory stays the same and the economy has to adapt to suit it; it is a pseudo-scientific discipline designed to resist political interference more than a technique to measure and comment. Post-war economics professors might fail degrees on the current consensus view that "awareness / appreciation of contexts / knowledge" is vital to scrape-through a course and get a degree. If you could label the traffic-lights that allow a student to get a degree, the consensus document would look like this.
● Ignorance
● Awareness
/ appreciation of contexts in which techniques are relevant
/ knowledge
● Familiarity
/ proficiency
/ competent use
For 1980s economists, the lights are reversed when it comes to any understanding of things like national insurance or the NHS. To make things worse, the ignorance is concealed. School economics describes how a lot of society works; students expect higher education to do the same, but it doesn't. The half of the economy that's public funded disappears from advanced parts of the textbooks. Economists and politicians who study them get puzzled about why something ends-up as public-funded or private-funded; about the costs of markets and the costs of public provision. They tend towards sweeping statements about the public sector, rather than parts of it.
There ought to be a title or heading here because the thread changes
If these notes seem a bit flippant for someone spending three years on a bogus economics degree during an economic crisis, it is because students are the lucky ones among their age group, even if the course makes no sense at all.. Other people the same age are really bored and do anything but train-spotting to pass the time, sometimes acting-out the plots of Irvin Welsh novels, or The Full Monty or Billy Elliot or Pride. Other people the same age and older are working or on strike from coal mines under the campus, thinking about the same issues. In year two I lived next to the Silverdale Colliery branch line and counted about 50 waggons of coal at about 10 miles an hour going to some power station, as miners returned to work; I am in the right place to learn about economics, except for the bit about being on an economics course. Economics, as a taught subject, seems to be a bogus one.
Begg, 1984, page xix
People occasionally ask me questions when they discover that I'm on an economics course, like - "what's the answer?". That seems a reasonable expectation of a 90-week adult education course, mainly for young people who have just passed economics A-level. If the course does not have that purpose, it should have some other clearly-stated name and purpose, like "economic issue avoidance studies", or "initiation ritual to weed-out non-believers", so that students know not to take it.
Ninety weeks on a campus, half-time, minus time spent on exams and short courses, to find out why so many parents are redundant or bust, so many student places are cut, so few job prospects exist, and life is turning in to an Irvin Welsh novel. This paragraph really belongs at the top somewhere.
Digresion on Digressons
Please excuse this prose; it makes no great sense. It is a series of notes cobbled-together and just leads where it goes. I had no idea what I was going to write about when I started, but just felt an urge to write about the wierdness of this economics course and about the 80s recession, which I kept trying to summerise in an introduction, over and over again, and sometimes remembering to merge them or delete them.
Sometimes a long-bit spins-off into another more coherent blog post.
Further down there is a more structured bit with recent student feedback questionarre questions next to what happened in the 80s, so it does get a bit more structured later-on.
By chance, Fishman himself had a similar habit. He would teach textbook till near the end of the class, and then spin-off into an anecdote. In his US days I expect they were about the wonders of the modern US economy, but, given more freedom in the UK, he preferred anecdotes about whatever came into his head of an economic kind - jumpers - warm beer - the need for welfare and the military in a third world country - things not working so well as you get older - all sorts of things. And the habit of musing about digressions is useful for keeping us all sane because it brings-in the obvious points that are not officially recognised as relevant.
The graph above is from the first edition of "Economics, British Edition", Begg, 1984, the main book recommended to students for background reading. Do you think anyone should say anything if the professor pretends he hasn't noticed? Definitely agree | Mostly agree | Neither agree nor disagree | Mostly disagree | Definitely disagree | What do people do in Greece when this happens?
Someone in a class asks about "Today's redundancies" and why the day's factory has closed. It has just stopped making so many Servis washing machines, just an hour down the motorway in Darleston, so the student quite likely has some reason for asking, like redundant taxpayer parents who paid Fishman's double wage. One each. Today's Redundancies is the subject that I guess people have committed years of their lives to study and want the man to teach. Washing machine factories that sustain a welfare state and employ UK taxpayers are an endangered species and this one grew over generations of productivity & thrift . "I don't know ... maybe it was the design or lack of investment or something like that", says Professor Fishman out of his double-paid arse. Servis machines are the first ones to use microchip control panels. I know this from a Design Centre exhibit of how many components they had saved. The people who bought the brand when the factory closed still write that these are "the first washing machines in the world to harness quartz technology for increased precision. This made the Servis Quartz one of the most advanced and reliable washing machines of its time. In fact some Quartz machines are still going strong today, over 30 years later.""They won an award from the Design Centre", I say, in solidarity with my fellow student protester, because this is obviously about macro-economics and I'd seen the Servis exhibit at the Design Centre in London. Fishman knows about the Design Centre. He's written an article for the people who run it. "Oh. - I don't know", says Fishman out of his arse To quote an obituary, Fishman loses "any chances he had of reaching academic stardom" in my eyes. Apparently his generation of US economists could all be stars if they had a reasonable amount of talent. They pretended to have been the first to have discovered loads of rather obvious facts to write in Econometrica and called it a subject, in which professors found it bad for their careers to refer to anything outside economic journals. They would use the phrase "in economics", as in "autism has a different meaning in economics". I suppose if an economist had written to Econometrica that he wore a hat, then, "in economics", he would count as the person who discovered hats and be a great man. Another Fishman obituary quotes what happened if you asked someone from this background a question that wasn't answered in the text book: "I don't believe you have the right to ask me that question. I have the right to freedom of association..."
Recessions follow wars. Recessions follow banking and financial crisis. Recessions follow cowboy economists if governments take their advice
Thatcher's advisers had a new policy, which was to fiddle the exchange-rate upwards by whatever method, like paying over the odds to borrow government debt. All over the world, the big-scale full-time investors like fund managers would buy government stock from this mug of a government burning its taxpayers' money.
Money sloshed about very quickly in the 1980s. Edward Heath said so. He came and gave a speech at Keele and quoted some big international investor like Goerge Sophos or whatever name who had told him that it just took a few clicks on a computer keyboard to move extraordinary amounts of money from one investment in one currency to another in another currency. I don't know why he said that, but I know that Edward Heath lived on cunsultancy money from the Chinese government after being an MP.
Where were we?
Overseas investors buying UK government stock (or anything else with related interest rates but they are interested in easy sloshes of money so it's mainly government stock)
So the pound rises against the European currencies or Asian curreincies, even if they are not being manipulated the other way by more savvy governments.
Exports, priced in pounds, are harder to sell; imports, priced in other currencies, are a good substitute for anything a UK factory can make.
The method for fiddling the exchange rate was called "monetary policy" - the bottom set of lines on the diagram. It was known that if interest rates went up, the exchange rate goes-up as more overseas investment managers sloshed their holdings around the world to take advantage of a fraction of an extra percent. It seems odd for the treasury to pay more than necessary for r borrowing, but that's what it did, and economics teaching is so bad that nobody thinks this odd. The treasury could also try to raise interest rates among banks, because it controlled the central banks' emergency lending service to them from the central bank. So other banks would not want to lend much money at less than this emergency rate, for fear of getting caught-out and lending money at less than the rate they could borrow it. The same policy effected all the big types of loan - business loans, mortgages, and consumer credit. It seems odd for the treasury to discourage loans for business investment, but that's what it did.
As the exchange rate changed, exports became less possible and cheaper imports flooded-in along the bottom row of arrows on the diagram. Factories that did any exporting had to shrink a lot very fast or close. And meanwhile there was a squeeze on anything that people borrow money for, like business loans, mortgages, and consumer credit. There had been a squeeze anyway on business loans - the banks had a near monopoly on taking deposits under the 1979 banking act and were no longer interested in customers like my father who wanted business loans. Now there was a bigger squeeze. The policy closed exporting factories in such a crass way that you could call it deliberate. I do. Thatcherites would mostly eliminate manufacturing if it helped the cause of the moment, I think, because one of them says so. "We would mostly eliminate manufacturing", writes Professor Patrick Minford, an economics professor now employed by students of Cardiff University after advising the governments of the UK and Malawi. He is an example of someone not to ask for economic advice, as many of these students suggest in their Unistats feedback.
Inactivity rates increased following the recession, reaching a peak of 23.2% (7.82 million) in the summer of 1983, with most of the increase accounted by males
- J Jenkins of the Office for National Statistics in Economic and Labour Market Review, August 2010. There is no link because stats series have changed and the government web site people have been asked not to provide a direct link I suppose - you have to search.
There were subtleties too, but they didn't make things any better. North sea oil exports had already rigged the exchange rate against UK manufacturing in a way the Norwegian exports didn't because of a different system - the tax money went into a fund. The UK system was that the government was short of cash and needed it at all costs. So there was already a market that would reduce inflation but make exports harder and put people out of work, but that wasn't noticed in UK politics or economists.
There was a tradition in UK politics of cabinet ministers wanting a strong pound. Churchill was keen in the 1930s. So there were very poor job prospects for anyone a job competing with people from the rest of the world, like manufacturing jobs competing with migrant labour, or goods from the Dominion of India with its sweatshops in places like Rana Plaza, Bangladesh. The person who's job can be done by a migrant.
There is a tradition in UK politics of thinking that people in Bangladesh do not need to have compulsory insurance schemes or a welfare state in order to sell to the UK. It was introduced to the EU tariff system for Bangladesh after special pleading from the UK government, p-l-e-e-d-i-n-g t-o m-a-k-e p-e-o-p-l-e i-n B-a-n-g-l-a-d-e-s-h & t-h-e U-K b-o-t-h p-o-o-r-e-r and has made Bangladeshis and people in the UK poorer ever since. Other EU politicians have introduced special schemes for leather from Ethiopia or all goods from Mexico, dispite the unfair competition involved, so I expect there are other people peeding to make Ethiopians and Europeans poorer, with the same success. And the cows.
Containerized shipping made world trade far cheaper in container-sized lumps than it had been. So the policy made a bad situation worse. Things were not so bad in the home counties and London, where my parents had a house. Looking at a national newspaper in Northern Ireland I was surprised that the job ads were the same. I assumed from London that the ads were different in different parts of the UK, but everyone read those same job ads together, like the telesales ads pretending to be something to do with journalism, or the Richmond Fellowship Holly Lodge that kept The Guardian in business with its ads for live-in volunteer work and jobs that would now pay below the minimum wage. Newham Community Renewal Programme had a bit turnover too. Officially the economic policy was called the "Medium Term Financial Strategy", and was measured by something called Sterling M3 - a briefly fashionable measure of something that can be measured and so pleases a school of economic thought, but doesn't relate very clearly to anything else, like the shape of clouds or the pitch of bird-song. There was no monetary policy committee before 1997 - decisions in the early 80s were made by the chancellor Geoffrey Howe in public, and his boss's american academic economic advisers in private. The fact that Howe resigned with a speech about currencies suggests that, in the early 80s, Thatchers' economic advisers from the USA made most of the decisions and that problems with the exchange rate even troubled the chancellor. Unemployment reached three and a half million including half a million on government schemes, if you take a few minster's quotes from Hansard for the target numbers that the biggest ones were meant to employ and round-up to account for the little ones. On top of that number were a growing number of sick people, and people excluded from statistics for thirteen different reasons like "excluding school leavers" quoted above the graph. There was another exclusion of everyone over 60. Or maybe it was 55 - all called economically inactive instead of unemployed. We had a few essays to write about early 1980s unemployment stats, which I forget and so have googled information just recently. If inactivity rates for males of working age are higher than usual, they were higher still in Longton which had about the second worst unemployment rates in the UK as well as some of the best integration of factories and housing to allow easy delivery between factories and allowing people to walk to work. What could be one of the best places to live and work in manufacturing became one of the worst places to find a job, because of the manufacturing link.
I wrote some on another page. People often write that the 80s recession, loss of industry, the deficit, and effect on a generation, were probably something to do with liberal reforms. Google the same point made alongside an opposite one on other sites like "economics help", which that the government fiddled the exchange rate. The 1984 Begg textbook agrees.My 1980s recession explanations agree too. My 1980s economics course seemed designed to stop students from finding-out.
The next box here is a lost introduction that needs to go somewhere. Next come structured points about a long-forgotten economics course that must have been typical. It's relevant now to me, to anyone who wonders why economics teachers missed the 2008 recession coming-along, and to Keele Uni which is usually about number one for student satisfaction and has had some really good economics teaching - mainly in the time just before I was there.
Should economics teachers know about at least one economy, measure it, and discuss it with students in tutorials? No because teachers might be summoned to the McArthy or Todd Committee, followed by unfair dismissal from Colorado University. Or a hostile government might concentrate funding cuts on one university like Keele.Yes because decision-makers make bigger mistakes if nobody knows how the economy works, and anyway this group of students has signed-up, the course has just enough funding to carry-on, and it's unfair to offer a maths course taught by weathermen instead.
I wind-up to a point, politely-put with evidence I hope, but should have put it at the start.
First year economics is "a £9,000 lobotomy" according to some people who studied it at Manchester University in 2013, and it wasn't much better at Keele in 1985.
This is the 2013 version from Manchester
First year:
ECON10041
Principles of Micro and ECON10042
Principles of Macro (For those without A level economics), ECON10081
UK Micro and ECON100082 UK Macro (For those with A level economics).
100% of marks awarded by multiple choice exam for both Principles modules in first year.
UK Micro and Macro have 90% awarded by multiple choice exams and the other 10% is an essay. However, this essay is only 1,000 words long and students get 100% for handing it in on time. This means that many students don’t widely research the topic or fully engage with the material.
Micro and Macro Principles are a delivery of neoclassical theory and students are expected to learn the theory by rote.
There is no mention of what school of thought is being taught or that there are any other schools of thought. It is presented as facts about the world which leads to the possibility of students believing that these ideas represent indisputable truths (Section 1 (1)).
Keynes is mentioned briefly in Macro Principles but the ideas presented are actually those of John Hicks and his version of Keynesian thought, rather than of Keynes himself. There is no time given to looking at the underlying assumptions in either of these two modules, very little real world application and no historical context as to where these ideas came from (Section 1 (2), (3) and (4)). Apart from the odd mention of economic growth in China and hyperinflation there is no proper analysis of how the theory taught is applied to these examples. The most concerning thing is the complete lack of critical engagement and opportunity for the students to discuss what they are learning. Tutorials comprise of working through problem sets and there is no opportunity to discuss the material in any real depth with the teaching assistants and lecturers (Section 1(6) and (7)).
In UK Micro and Macro the multiple-choice structure of both exams rewards the ability to regurgitate textbook information, and fails to encourage students to think analytically about economic problems. Students become disillusioned with the wider challenges of economics and are immersed in learning a set of diagrams and equations. Furthermore, according to the mark scheme in UK Micro, marks are awarded for mentioning all the pricing theories which are taught but if a student provides an in-depth discussion of the economic implications of one or two pricing theories this goes unrewarded. In-depth analysis of theories shows a much greater economic understanding but is disregarded in place of the ability to repeat given information. This is a missed opportunity for students to learn skills of critical reflection (Section 1(6) and (7)). This system of memorising information to pass an exam leaves students with fragmented ‘bits’ of theory rather than a solid base to build economic knowledge on.
The 1985 version at Keele was for a split course in less than half students' time. We did three subjects in year one.
Part of the economics time was spent on statistics.
The other part was a series of rules of thumb about markets, and here my description splits between a description of teaching, which I remember slightly fondly - and the syllabus, which was a bit like the lecturer standing up on a tall ladder and pissing on the students. Nobody said anything.
Imagine studying any technical subject at A-level, going-on to study more, and finding that a different stupid subject is taught using the same name. Imagine that the stupid subject reles its theories with each other, rather than the facts. You don't have to imagine it if you do A-level Economics and then a degree; it is blatant.
The other students were a bit different to me. Most had chosen a popular college for two-year two-subject degrees; they would have read a few prospectuses, and I guess they knew that other university economics courses were even worse. At London School of Economics we would have seen gentlemen pleasuring themselves with mathematics. And the writer of our back-up reference book, David Laidler, did the same for second and third year students at Western Uni in Canada..
<Digression: rude to lecturers vaguely remembered>
If I met these people face to face, which I didn't do at the time, it would be a bit awkward to say that the lectures were like someone standing up on a ladder and pissing on the students. The person who gave cow theory (development studeies) lectures got up on a ladder and pissed on the students too. What if I met both at once? I mean to be rude about the syllabus and not the lecturer, but, face to face, I'd have to admit some overlap. The lecturers did not walk-out. They applied for the jobs. One of them tried to bring examples about the housing market into his lectures and wrote to the textbook writer with suggestions, acknowledged in the second edition. The other moved-on to teaching international trade and tax when his boss changed, according to Web.archive.org and google books. I remember that keele lecturers lectured well.. But they were part of a system and the truth is that I am quite rude to everyone in the system.
Update 2020 The international trade lecturer wrote similar points about teh subject of economics in his 1984 book, which is available for reading an hour at a time or more on web archive. I have got up to page 19 https://archive.org/details/internationaltra0000john/page/n19/mode/2up He prints some quotes about how split the area of study is, with scientific pretensions interpreted by people like students as fact, or fiction, or a jumbled "faction", often presented by people who manipulate greek symbols and lack critical nous or historical perpective. He also mentions learning from the reactions of students of International Relations, and of Economics, at Keele.
There are loads of people in the higher education industry who allow stupid economics courses to carry-on because they are taken-in by the idea of micro-economic theories trying to agree with each other, rather than agree with the facts of the economy. Somebody even even offered a job to Patrick Minford, the man who wrote "we would mostly eliminate manufacturing, but that should not be seen as a bad thing" - that was at Cardiff, rather than Keele, and Cardiff now has about the least popular economics degree on unistats, so he has mostly eliminated employment teaching economics at Cardiff Uni, but someone did not see that as a bad thing.
Many of the people to insult are students who apply for the courses, including myself at the time, and all the advisers around them. I have insulted a very large number of people who are unlikely to meet me all at once face-to-face. Anyway, I am happy to talk about this rudeness face-to-face rather than take it off an obscure blog. Otherwise I would be even more rude to millions of people, including my own parents and other Keele students, who suffered crazed economic policies and unfair government budgeting without any way of arguing-back or judging how much was their fault for not running a business or getting a job, and how much was the fault of stupid grim-faced economics students who apply to keep bad courses going, stupid higher education people who tick the boxes and think the courses are alright, and economics lecturers who get-up on a tall ladder and piss on the students. </Digression: rude to lecturers vaguely remembered>
<Digression on awkwardness>
There is video of David Cameron MP's experesson when asked about government loans to help the last deep coal mine run as a staff co-op for a while in order to pay-back the loans and pay redundancy money. David Cameron was an Oxford student in the early 80s and his expression suggests that he had no idea what was going-on.
I recall that stats part of my course using computers - without much success but against all the odds - to do some kind of fact-based excercise. I recall studying interesting statistics - or at least the headings - for different kinds of unemployment and different changes in the way it was counted. So the impression is of a course sometimes better than whatever Mr Cameron's network knew
We'd studied rules of thumb about markets before, at A-level, and they're listed in the Begg textbok that students had to buy. They're put in an anecdotal, prosaic way as examples that make sense in context and can be illustrated with a diagram. At A-level, it seemed a rather silly part of the course that seemed to be for people who were a bit thick, and was contracted to a different teacher on a lower pay scale, but I suppose it's easier to talk about markets if everyone has had the basic training and that I learned something along the way. I assumed that was the end of rules of thumb.
The degree version was different. You have to see a bit of Laidler's Microeconomics text book to believe it; it is not what any sane student would signed-up to study.
Presented as pure theory, even on BA courses (I suppose the BSc courses have algebra as well as graphs) and the theory attempts internal consistency. If this is true, then that is true, then the third things is true. The theory is not to be used in models, as a starting point to compare with reality. The theory is taught for its own sake as a kind of hobby, and stripped of all reference to reality. Price becomes P, quantity becomes Q, and so-on, just to make it look more technical and harder to track. The behaviour or P&Q are derived from the previous lecture, and on to the next one, for ever.
Any student hopes that this awful start will lead to something better. Maybe the theory will lead to a model that says "theory predicts x and reality is a little off, so think of your own ways to expand on that". But my Laidler textbook had none of that - it was entirely about the internal consistency of various graphs and jargon words which were almost impossible to read because so irrelevant; there is nothing at the end of the book about testing against reality as a model. Instead, the book suggests that reality should follow the theory be told-off; it is "a way of thinking", according to the Laidler textbook.
Why don't people walk out? I suppose that students hope this will lead somewhere. But, as a graduate, I can tell you that it didn't. We may as well have memorised random numbers or painted coal white.
Edinburgh University has ceased teaching undergraduate economics degrees after protests, so maybe the rest who teach this stuff will do the same soon and avoid ripping-off students.
A rule of thumb:
The latin teacher effect
The London School of Economics (LSE) runs one of the most selective courses; it has most control over which students suit the course best and are allowed to sign-up. These same students rank it bottom of the charts for satisfaction. LSE ability to select students for the course is on left of the diagram; LSE student satisfaction with their chosen course is on the right. The bars chart relative scores to other economics degrees; the number is an absolute number mixed-up from some Unistats scores, and published in the Complete University Guide charts online in I think 2015 or 2016. A more detailed search in 2017, taking the single-subject degree, shows about the worst reference that students give anywhere. Obviously, they can't see past feedback acted-on. If they could see that, the course would have closed, although 30% are naturally loyal and lie on the form and say that it's clear how past feedback has been acted on. 46% believe that staff want to act on student feedback - so that's the liars plus another 16%. The feedback isn't just asking for easier work either - only 67% believe they are prompted to do their best work. Nor is it a question of the subject being naturally hard. Students are only 74% stimulated by the choice of material on the syllabus, even though they chose to study something called economics, and they are only 60% interested by its presentation. A third think the system of marking is agreed in advance, or that they can see past feedback acted-on, 40% think they are part of a community of staff and students. About half think they know what's coming next and how to choose the next module. Two thirds think they can apply a breadth of knowledge from different areas or study one subject in depth, but less than that - 53% - think they can even apply what they have learned, so presumable "depth" means more and more un-applied theory. It is clearly a course that should close.
An observation. The people who write the course at London School of Economics are unusually blyth about wasting students' time and money. They'll probably carry-on until someone finds a way to sue them for it. Just as social workers are unusually blythe about inviting clients in for an assessment when there's no point, or police used to be unusually blythe about stop-and-search patrols.
<DIGRESSION ON 80s POLICING>
An odd thing about being picked-up for cruising in the 80s was that I wasn't beaten-up or anything like that. It was all very dignified and most of the two or three times I was just picked-up and released. In the 50s and 60s I think it would have been different. Magistrates would believe the confession of a boy with a black eye, written in police jagon and presented by private sector solicitors who's job depended on backing-up police cliams. Thatcher's ability to invent a whole new public sector bureaucracy made policing better. The same system ought to be applied to employment law, under which people are sacked as rivals or whistleblowers or troublemakers rather than being bad at the job or doing the alleged gross misconduct and the large organisation that used to employ them spends as much as it wants on loyal lawyers. Organisations like big charities, aid agencies, government contractors, councils, schools, and health trusts. So some system by which only approved lawyers could do the work could allow a lot more rivals and whisleblowers to work for our taxes and donations.
There was one arrest by the Tactical Reserve Unit, a 1980s group of squaddie-like people who sometimes got billeted at the diplomatic protection police station that existed in Barnes. They drove vans rather than cars, and in the van one of them told me this as a squaddie says things like "we're called the purple helmets". He told me that they were a special unit for tackling riots, but there weren't any riots just then so they had to find something to do. Handing me over at Putney Police Station, he said he thought I was cruising in a public place (gross indecency under the strange edwardian criminal law amendment act at the time) . "With respect, it's not public". "Yes it is: people walk their dogs". "Not in the dark at night". As soon as the tactical reserve unit were gone, I was released.
I don't know what can sort-out LSE professors except student boycott - a boycott by a nieve group of customers who have often come a long way on parental funding.
The more selected students at the LSE ought to be easier to satisfy, because they can be selected for similar interests and abilities. A less selected group of students could want opposite things to each other, or have vaguely different and less clear ideas of what the course is for, if anything, and so be harder to please all at the same time. They'd also lack the precocious few who went to LSE instead. A lot could end-up on the course with no clear interest, and so not work much on it. Or not be cut-out for studying, and need a very structured clear simple course that's easy to grasp.Some could want business tips from someone not in business. Some could want to sort the economy out while not yet Chancellor of the Exchequer. Possible disappointment all-round. All a good excuse for dis-satisfaction at somewhere like Open University, but not at the the big LSE course with different streams of study and students selected to want them.. Here are some theories.
Theory Number One is not very good
Mick Jagger was an LSE student, something that I guess a lot of current students know, and the "can't get no satisfaction" lyric might go through their heads as they fill in the feedback forms. That is theory number one, but not very good because I guess the students are good at things like stats and try to keep first impulses in check.
Theory Number Two is not much better
Expensive inner-cities could leave all students jaundiced, and their feedback could be lower for all departments. Except that other subjects are scored better by students doing joint-honours; mathematical economics options do worse.
Theory Number Three isn't much based on experience
The LSE is a highly international college. It says so on the prospectus. It shares low scores with the School of Oriental and African Studies. For this reason, it's likely that students and staff at both colleges are under-qualified to think about one particular economy like the one in the UK, or two to compare; they each know scraps about everywhere. For example they can read a reference to the Morris Marina as an example of failed state intervention before closure of in-efficient industries, and they can believe it; they lack background knowledge to correct the conventional truth. Until the conventional truth describes some part of the world that they know about, and then it seems wrong.
I don't know what do do with this theory. It's based outside my experience. For example I don't know how much people can choose to study the economic history of one country even while living in another, but there is a clue. Nearly 500 economic history students at the LSE were surveyed for this 2017 group of Unistats, and under 70% thought "staff made the subject interesting". That's near the bottom of the charts - just above courses with known problems like the Cardiff department which sacked its head for going a bit mad, or whatever happens each year on the Aberdeen MA course. There are regular protests at Manchester, and some kind of disaster at Sheffield. Other than that, London School of Economics is near the bottom of the list I want to cross out this theory because some of the facts point directly against. The teachers of economic history at Keele had lived of worked round the world in Australia, Germany, Norway, London and the Midlands and seemed well informed in spite of it all. So I guess that it's the studying of economic history, rather than the teaching of it, which is unlikely to work while migrating.
Theory Number Four: the answer is written in the prospectus and articles by staff
The LSE prospectus gives a view about who should apply. It begins by tempting-in students with references to real problems. It ends by admitting that this is con. The course is the opposite of a course on real problems: it demands an interest in maths. There's only a chance to do anything else in the third year. Students have to suffer years one and two in hope that they lead somewhere. It is a bad deal; a bad offer. If the deal was on a supermarket shelf it would say "Buy Three, Get One!". People like me who go for this deal are not good with money. Then when the third year comes, the other students on the course will have more experience of international travel and maths than of the UK economy, UK state services, or critical thought.
modern economics requires an aptitude for and enjoyment of mathematics ... first-year core courses for undergraduate programmes in the Department of Economics include both mathematics and statistics. ... All of the programmes ... take a mathematically rigorous approach to the subject, and are therefore very demanding of quantitative and analytical ability and interest. This should be taken into consideration when deciding whether this is the most suitable degree programme for you - 2017 LSE course description (aimed at applicants with A-level maths at the top grade)
An LSE lecturer wrote in The Guardian in 2008, partly defending his course with a circular "because I say so" argument.
Professional economics .. is very, very mathematical. This is true both for theoretical economics, which involves a lot of theoretical maths, and for applied economics, which involves a lot of number crunching of one sort and another. - Tim Leunig of the LSE writing in The Guardian, 2008
I don't know what "theoretical economics" could be. It sounds an embellishment of rules-of-thumb to a daft extent and out of context. Like a theoretical dog or theoretical food. As for "applied economics", there has to be an application or it isn't applied. The application ought to the "very, very" part of the course, and come first, or there is a risk of redundant theory or theory that's boring because out of context. The context could be a criticism of an economic claim, like the claims by Oxford Economics for the British Fashion Council or the reports of economic benefits from Heathrow. Or anything that students and teachers are interested in. Anyway I don't know why LSE economists don't use a computer to help with this kind of thing
dig data and know if other data says the opposite
crunch numbers with a rather frightening bit of software that takes a bit of learning
know the limits of rules of thumb - the ones that say whether one thing like price effects another thing like demand, or the rule of thumb that says whether points of data fit a distribution.
The same article suggests that economists aren't well educated.
Today many people call for restrictions on trade, even though every economist worth that title knows that free trade is good for both sides in almost all circumstances. Similarly many aid groups call for policies that will immiserate the very people they claim to want to help. Many people support those calls because they know so little about how the economy works, and people in the developing world are poorer as a result.
Those statement are not useful on their own. Free trade between a welfare state, with high social insurance costs, and another country with lower costs, can't work very well. The problem is made worse because very poor people tend to cope by having a lot of children, partly in hope of care in old-age, and fear of too many children dying along the way. Partly it just happens, when boys and girls are working and not at secondary school. So workers in one country have to pay social insurance costs, aid costs, and worse in emergencies while workers in the other country suffer over-population and are desperate. Both groups suffer the consequences of economic migration, and an economist could state more about this where sympathy goes to the migrant but the effects effect both groups. Add to that the complications of manipulated currencies - often manipulated on economic advice - and export subsidies that exist in countries like Bangladesh paid for by Bangladeshi tax payers - and you get an economic disaster which this economist doesn't mention. Free trade led to falling wages in Bangladesh and jobs like the ones at Rana Plaza, while wiping-out a lot of the textile trade in the UK. The economist states a good rule of thumb with no mention of its limits. He says "almost all circumstances", so I suppose he thinks free trade benefited Bangladeshis and people in the UK. Here is another good rule-of-thumb taken out of context, without its limitations. This time it is rejected.
Until the 1970s people really did think that governments could spend their way out of recessions,
The policy generally worked, I thought, but spare capacity has to be available and likely to be used by the extra spending. So the idea suits rapidly-investing economies or economies in recession. The idea of public building works on things like The Hoover Dam or motorways or Ireland's Famine Roads or Mussolini's motorways is still, obviously, a good idea I think. The problem is when more general government spending expends, that carries-on after the recession, and could be spent on goods from the back of the planet because they're not available locally, or crowd-out the private sector which can't borrow so cheaply, or encourage inflation. So both rules of thumb are good, within limits. This economist accepts one rule of thumb and rejects the other without any ifs and buts. He doesn't seem to know his own ignorance, and his education gives a clue to the reason.
LSE insists on an A grade at maths A-level, and even Oxford, which has the least mathematical economics course of any top [sic] UK university, notes that "94% of recent successful applicants have A-Level mathematics". And having got to a top university to read economics, students then find that they have let themselves in for a lot of maths: half of the LSE first year consists of formal maths courses, and another quarter is mathematical economics. If you want to be a professional economist, you need to do the maths.
Reason for self-destruction at the LSE : the Latin teacher effect
The last bit of indirect evidence is obvious to anyone educated a few decades ago. Colleges churned-out Latin graduates, who applied for teaching jobs as they had fewer alternatives than other graduates. Schools found the quality of job applicants very good for the money among Latin graduates, so they tried to slip Latin into any course possible and teach a lot of compulsory Latin. I remember it was a main subject at prep school and the start of secondary school. The latin teacher effect was so-obvious that nobody thought to mention it, and now it is forgotten. Unis did the same. In the 1930s my mum was told she couldn't go to university because she hadn't studied Latin. Universities taught even-more Latin related stuff, churned-out more Latin graduates, and the cycle repeated itself. The cycle - the Latin teacher effect - was obvious for Latin, and I think it's obvious for Maths at the LSE. Their prospectus says they want people with maths A-level straight out of school. Maths junkies. Even a year out of education can sap students patience for "mathmatical argument", meaning that people grow out of it and realise that it's a waste of time. This system is unfair on the maths teacher as well as the student. If the purpose of theory were taught at the same time as the theory, then the maths teacher would be the Cool Person with a nifty insight into how a problem might be solved. If the theory is taught first, then someone has the job of teaching algebra to bored young faces.
There's evidence of how the Maths Teacher Effect or the Latin Teacher Effect spread from places like the LSE to Keele. Firstly, people change jobs, and the general expectation tends to converge towards the average from whatever the college was first set-up to do. Second, there is a web of external reports by new vice chancellors, re-organisations, external examinors, who ask why a course can't be made as bad as others in the same subject. They wouldn't use that word. They'd use the word "good", but they are people from other Economics departments. There is a long careful summery of how to avoid the trap here - http://www.keeleucu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/Alternative-Plan.pdf - and I doubt many colleges have people who are willing to come-up with alternative plans like this; I expect most just converge towards the bad.
Chapter Two:
comes round again a bit here
It's good for people to know what the 1980s recession was
The manufacturing crisis caused by bad economists, politicians who picked them and voters who picked the politicians. And Murdoch & Maxwell news.
Bit about finance in the 70s
Chapter X:
the bracing routine of studying micro-economic theory
More recently, a quango has had some funding to draft discussion points for the subject that it sometimes called "expectations" without any legal force beyond the sale of goods and services act if the course isn't described properly and offers something else, but they are default discussion settings for "those involved in the design, delivery, or review of programmes of study of economics", or "a prospective student or current student". I guess they're mainly used by external examiners. The points describe loose "threshold" and "typical" levels, which I imagine like the amber & green of a traffic light that you need to pass to get a degree. The implied sentences mean something like this
● Ignorance
● Awareness / appreciation of contexts in which techniques are relevant / knowledge
● Familiarity / proficiency / competent use
Economics introductory courses are nobbled
Why UK economics courses forget the 1980s mess-up
Why British manufacturers under-invested, except Morris who under-invested
Mr Morris of Morris Motors was different.
If an economics professor won't profess about recession, should they retire?Definitely agree Mostly agree Neither agree nor disagree Mostly disagree Definitely disagree Obituaries in national newspapers should be published
My father was also a student in the first years of the war. It was easy to get a place in a grand-sounding university in the late 30s and early 40s because people at universities are usually of military age; if you were fit for one university, I guess you were pretty-much fit for all of them. The teachers were like the cast of Dad's Army, and it was normal to start a course before military service, as my and Fishman did, in hope of securing a place on return. My fathers' brother didn't return from fighting in Holland that involved the stalking of an enemy sniper post from behind a haystack, with a very long radio arial. Officers on both sides had ordered continued fighting, even though anyone who listened to the radio rightly guessed it was a few days from the end of the war in Europe. Some of those who came back didn't take to being treated like people in a monastery or a boarding school. The boss of one college ordered barbed wire to be put on the walls, in some wierd attempt to stop people leaving the building at night. One morning he found the ex-commandos had coiled it up and returned to block the stairs outside his staff flat, I think the walls went without barbed wire after that.
Fishman had tried a few experiments at Berkley on return from war, trying to help students who got badly treated while working as restaurant staff by taking collective action. He didn't get far but it was a good idea. He had another idea to delay or stop this planned loyalty oath system, which was to get enough people to refuse on principal that it could not be used as a way of smmandoscocking staff. Another good try. My father also served in the lowest rank and survived doing Russian supply convoys in wobbly Liberty Boats by fluke - because they were cancelled. He was offered a chance to be a weather man and took it. The meterological staff used to use seaweed to look technically competant to visiting officers. Like algebra, nobody knew what it meant except that the met office staff were busy. When allowed to leave the forces he returned to his university, changed his subject and met his partner a few years later. He said that returning soldiers are good at exposing silly managers. Someone at his live-in college tried to stop students returning after-hours by putting barbed wire on the walls. Ex-commandos took it off and very honestly left it blocking the manager's staircase, just in case he had some other use for it. The page below is the kind of teaching material available for Business Administration lectures. It's from the contents pages of Samuelson's 1948 textbook. You can see it on the "search inside" page on Amazon for a new reprint and there's a transcript on a blog page called Leslie Fishman Writings. There are other chapters but these are the most relevant for reasons I guess below the quote. A first impression is that there wasn't an A-level economics course in those days; this textbook starts from scratch, which gives it a sense of being a coherent whole. It's based on one decade, one author, one country. Those who read every word might have more detailed comments. The person who wrote it had an easy job because a reason for being a student in 1948 - specially if you ended up on the business administration course - was to avoid the draft to be killed in Vietnam, a subject absent from the textbook. Paul Samuelson's courses were full to the brim. Likewise, when I studied at Keele in 1984, the main reason was to avoid unemployment of the kind surely to apply to us students of useless teaching by over-paid people who listened to Pete Seeger and reheased multiple-choice excercises about broiler chickens and X-shaped diagrams. Whatever teaching assistants did at Berkley, it might have included revision classes and answering questions from puzzled students, so Fishman would have been a walking index to the new Samuelson text book. For his dissertation, he would have known chaptor nine almost by heart. A student newspaper suggests he might have lectured in insurance, so he would have known chapter 10 almost by heart, as well as any other chapters that he worked-on as a teaching assistant. The year Fishman got an unfair dismissal, a 35 year-old from Idaho did the rounds of California academic conferences touting the most un-apealing jobs in academia. The job was in a small college surrounded by cows in the middle of nowhere that was not yet called a university, although it planned to award degrees in three years' time. It was a college for older teenagers. Other courses were the things teenagers studied in Idaho - often very precise craft subjects like "fender repair". The job started in a few years' time with the title "instructor". Student reviews call this one of the "best cheap colleges"; wages probably weren't good. And so many teenagers were studying any possible degree course to avoid the Vietnam draft that it was hard to get academic staff at any institution, let alone Idaho.
People in Idaho have an unusual characteristic. They are very serious about farming statistics, and like to share good ideas for free rather than keep them secret. At least, that was the opinion of the young editor of a farming magazine called Practical Farmer who managed to borrow the latest calculating machines and teach himself statistics in the 1920s and 1930s, helping to build-up the statistics laboratory at Idaho State College. He went on to become vice president of the USA so he might not have been typical, but Idaho was the place to be to study statistics and farming. A similar enthusiasm survives at Practicalfarmers.org which I now realise is in Iowa rather than Idaho. A reference survives in Fishman's free-to-read work on unemployment in the Denver area a decade or two later. He footnotes a guide book to statistical methods, written by someone at Idaho. There's no record of anything Fishman wrote in the Idaho college library, but a google book search reveals him as "Instructor in Business" on a couple of inspectors' reports. Type "Pocatello" into the search box for either report and you see very specific course titles like "Fender repair", so "instructor" was a good job title. Idaho is somewhere were people are used to awkward beliefs, at least in their own traditions; it is a religious area with a the main tradition set by the prophet Joe Smith, who explained his trips to kneel in the woods by saying that he was praying and sometimes visited by an angel (that's in case anyone asked why someone was seen leaving through the bushes). It is hard to know if Joe Smith was a moron or a mascot. He was prone to visual hullucinations and somehow became a preacher (something that mentally troubled people still do in the USA according to an episode of Lois Theroux). Joe Smith was taken as a mascot by people around him when he preached. After a while the person in the bushes gave a name - "The Angel Moroni". Most likely the angel was a printer who ate biscuits, because a present appeared in a buscuit tin burried under a tree, for Joe Smith to find. The box contained a book written on "plates", which I suppose were printing plates but described as "golden plates" by Joe. I expect that some are lost because there is no mention of cruising in the woods in the book of mormon, but there is some stuff about polygamy. The faith group does practical things as well as credulous ones. It's rural. Current student reviews mention things like bowling clubs and long walks rather than politics. They don't note many alumni on wikipedia - just one beat poet and members of sports teams used to fill the gap. Fishman got two years' work at Idaho before completing his second degree, still awarded by Berkley and listed on their library catalogue in January 1957. It's called "Theories of the American Labor Movement": 500 pages exactly, plus 11 pages of bibliography, with other subject categories of John Rogers Commons (1862-1945), Robert F Hoxie (1868-1916), and someone has scanned the microfilm to put online but been restricted from doing so beyond a keyword count from a search box; the Berkley catalogue calls it "restricted content". If any Fishman relatives want to contact Hathi Trust, who keep the scanned archive, and make a case that they are the copywrite holder and give permission to publish, that would be good. Fishman's 12 year-old daughter asked him if he was a member of the communist party: "I don't believe you have the right to ask me that question. I have a constitutional right to freedom of association", he replied. Nowadays the position would be called "Don't ask; don't tell". He had relatives in the Soviet Union and wouldn't want to draw soviet police attention to them, nor US authorities to himself. He had fellow-travellors like Pete Seeger, the singer he's quoted as liking, who were called to Senate committees and used the same stock phrase; he would not have wanted to let them down either, even if he had lost all interest in political groups and preferred the saner technocratic world of economics.
The same year that Fishman got his doctorate, the local paper stated that he was leaving for Colorado and he was invited to speak on a similar subject at Cornell University, as part of a series of lectures commemorating Thorsten Veblen's free pdf and other works. There are 11 books on Veblen in the Idaho college libary, mostly from the 40s and 50s, but not the one that gave space to Fishman and edited by Douglas Dowd of Berkley and Cornell Universities, now at Dugdowd.org
Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd (born December 7, 1919) is an American political economist, economic historian and political activist.From the late 1940s to the late 1990s, he taught at Cornell University, UC Berkeley and other universities. He has authored books that criticise capitalism in general, and US capitalism in particular.Now in his eighties and semi retired, he continues to publish and has, for many years, offered a free class in San Francisco, where he used to live for half of the year. Now he lives full-time in Bologna. His last professorial engagement was several years at the University of Modena. Finally, the commute from Bologna became oppressive; he terminated his teaching career in 2012. - Dugdowd.org web site
Douglas Dowd gave free economics classes in San Francisco and still keeps-up the DugDowd.org website including a $10.95 download offer on the book with Fishman's chapter. D. F. Dowd (ed.), Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal (Ithaca NY, 1958), subtitledlectures and essays commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Veblen's birth. Fishman's chapter was calledVeblen, Hoxie, and American labor. That association seems to be what gave Fishman the sparkle-dust to look employable again. Someone sent an invite to Cornell lectures to the Cornell Daily Sun who didn't send a reporter but published the invite next to their adverts for smart underwear and horror films. Somehow, the invite records Fishman as already a professor at Colorado University who printed the publication in a proud book of staff writings soon after. The lucky break remained a family memory. A colleague of Fishman's daughter mentioned Veblen to her.
"Oh, my dad [the late Professor Les Fishman, Marxist economist] was very interested in Veblen, he contributed to a volume of essays on Veblen back in the 1950s". "With the help of the indispensable Abebooks I located a lone copy of "Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal" (Cornell University 1958) and was astonished by the profundity of his ideas, briefly revisited by a few American Leftists in the 1950s and then dropped almost without trace." - link to Fishman's chapter
Fishman got an economics job teaching at his home state college of Boulder, Colorado. I think I saw a Google snippet of him recorded as an assistant professor in 1957 but am not sure. A powerpoint promotion of the department puts him down as "faculty" for 1956-7. He was recorded as chairing a meeting there and working for the economics department in 1959 as part of a grand set of debates on all subjects. He signed himself "Leslie Fishman, University of Colorado" when writing for technical journals. So I guess he was there in the background, giving lectures, assigned to research projects, maybe supervising graduate students, allowed to take a temping job on Ford Scholarship money, but not obvious and up-close to undergraduate students, leaving the dates a little hazey.
Samuelson's new textbook from 1948 was so confident in its own superiority that (I think - I might be wrong) it suggested a course plan in an appendix for lesser professors to follow in this expanding subject, as though there was a shortage of professors and the people who got the job were all glad of a text-book to bluff from. I knew that there was a Great War an Great Depression but I didn't know there was a Great Professor Shortage at just the time Fishman qualified:
the demand for professors was so high in the 1950s that the American Council of Learned Societies held a conference in Cuba noting the too-few doctoral candidates to fill positions in English departments.
The shortage would have been most acute in new subjects. Pocetello began teaching for degrees and for Economics about the year Fishman joined; Boulder gave its economics teachers a separate department and larger building for more student numbers about the time Fishman joined. Even so, it's good to get called "Professor" after teaching the jobs available to graduate students. Professors get a double cell and someone to use as their bitch in the gulag under the campus (someone told me that and then gave me a funny look). It is not easy to compare to academic job prospects now. Usually you have to do something like teaching well, writing well, having another relevant career so you can say how things are done, being part of the Freemasons or the casting couch. In Fishman's case it wasn't the casting couch so the next thing to check his writing on Google Scholar's links to Jstor journal library. He taught about economic history leading up to current US growth rates, or at least he had the notes to hand because he worked them up into nearly 5,900 words 1960. It was quite a polished set of lecture notes, published in a journal for long articles. The paper would not have scored good marks on Fishman's own course, later-on at Keele, because it mentions original ideas in the final section which would have been marked wrong, but this is a tolerant journal. Another paper is titled "Is Higher Education a Hoax?". Then Econometrica reported him at the American Economic Society conference held in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1961. Fishman's name just has an asterisk next to it. He was given the last slot on a Tuesday afternoon to present his paper, after some grander macro-economics and a someone who loved algebra. Someone else who write about elasticity of demand for synthetic rubber got an asterisk too. Maybe their paper was too practical and immediate. Most people might have liked them; Idaho students might have liked them. They might have got published an Ebay Seller Guide or a piece in Plastics and Rubber Weekly, but they didn't get journal ranking peer-reviewed journals. The rule is: either you discover sacred texts buried under a tree in a biscuit tin, or you get published in a peer-reviewed journal if you want a college teaching job. I hope that he and the synthetic rubber person consoled each other. It was no problem because Fishman could do grand prose about economic history, he could keep an audience's attention in a lecture hall, and he could work on technical government jobs. The problem that would come-up was tutorials. He could tell his daughter that "I have the right to freedom of association", but it could break the flow of discussion if students asked him the same thing every week. If it was possible to be a professor and not do tutorials, Fishman had a good reason to avoid them. The Ford Foundation temp. job at Cambridge came very soon after getting work at Boulder. This suggests that economics college teachers were in demand, that Fishman had a certain knack, and that tutorials were not a big deal at Boulder; you wouldn't plan to jet-set around the world and leave a UK tutorial group with a new teacher. Keele students know that most UK colleges have three terms a year and most US ones have two, so the dates wouldn't have fitted. That's a pity for Fishman and his students because he missed the satisfaction by knowing what happened to them during a year and he missed their common sense and mess-ups and obvious questions. I guess that tutorial students can bring an economics tutor down to earth. I guess that this post-war anglo-american subject of economics lacks common sense because so many people have taught it without running tutorials. Fishman's daughter says he was "headhunted" to Boulder and "won" a Ford Foundation grant to do something at Cambridge. Was it the Freemasons? In a way, yes. This is someone else's account of being offered a chance to teach at Boulder. He discovers the american emphasis on lectures.
Les Fishman, visiting from the University of Colorado, received an SOS from back home: An economic historian was urgently needed for 1963–64, as the incumbent had gone off unexpectedly to Penn State. Now economist economic historians weren’t all that many in Cambridge, so the barrel was scraped and I was offered a visiting professorship at Boulder, where I had a very enjoyable two semesters, and learnt how to lecture. I must have been pretty awful to begin with. One of my auditors, whom I later met a few times on the ski slopes, asked after a few beers in the Nederland Tavern: ‘Are all English lecturers so boring?’ I’m sure he had a point; but I was learning, and when I went to teach summer school at Purdue my audience ratings were quite respectable.
I expected to read another paragraph saying that this man was keen on US Civil Rights or Communism or against the Vietnam war, but the freemasonry seems to be more among a narrow group of teachers who gave each other jobs - the same man says he was put on some committee as a "counterweight to the ... marxist faction", which would mean people who used a one or two ideas from Marx to find something easy to say about their subject, rather than someone who supported Stalin. So, there was a freemasonary among people who could vaguely look as though they could do the job during The Great Professor Shortage of the 1960s and somehow Fishman had joined it. It would be nice to think that Fishman promoted the new job by offering free taster classes on free-thinking subjects, like Douglas Dowd. Or open-ended discussions, like the teach-ins at Berkley. There was a series of odd multi-subject lectures from visitors during United Nations Week each year, followed by questions from the audience or debate with other guest speakers. Records don't say anything about student discussions, nor tutorials. If there were any on the timetable, it would have been hard to fit them round Fishman's schedule as he jumped from Boulder to Cambridge, back to Boulder, then on to Warwick University for a year's teaching in 1967. That might have been the first place that anyone noticed whether he could hold a tutorial or not. Fishman headed the list of authors for research on government contract: "Methodology for projection of occupational trends in the Denver standard metropolitan statistical area". There is a free pdf of the 1965 edition and the 1966 revision. Fishman was remembered by some civil rights acquaintances who used his free hospitality on their way to a campaign. They quote his slow goofy diction.
"we looked up Les Fishman (economics professor at the University of Colorado) .... They put us up for the night and then we toured the campus the next day."
"Fishman's first observation was the lack of ability on the part of the students to grasp ideas from a textbook. In a way, he has to spoon feed the text, but on the other hand, they won't do any permanent good if they can't develop a little independent thinking among the students". [...] "The bookstore carried practically nothing but textbooks; only Gandhi's autobiography and five or six other paperbacks were available." ... "library ... inadequate ... donated stock".
In 1962, Fishman wrote "An economic plan for disarmament" for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mar 01, 1962; Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 37-38, listed on one of Keele library's two on-line catalogues, although it only made it onto one of them. The title is a bit of a joke; it's a political journal and might have prompted the idea of a "keele list" of a hierachy of academic journals used to sort the next job applicants to be economics professor.
In 1962, he won a Ford Foundation fellowship to work with Nicholas Kaldor in the applied economics department at Cambridge. He returned to England as senior economics lecturer at Warwick University (1967-69) before becoming professor at Keele. - obituary by Nina Fishman
Minority staff are often expected to be better at their jobs than people who get a job by fluke and serve their time; this quote about a philosophy teacher at Colorado backs-up Fishman's daughter's story that he got an unfair dismissal because of his politics, rather than spoon-feeding the text of Samuelson's text book, which he should have been sacked for. There was also the summons to a Senate Committee reported as before Senator Todd, headlined "professers answer red tinge" in the local paper, which sent a photographer. The photo might show here or from the link, and it's worth clicking on the link if Getty Images don't want it to show, because it illustrates how a large group of teaching economists were subject to control from their bosses and from Congress Committees, and how the same kind of thing probably happens in lots of other colleges and schools and countries, off and on, so that the textbook view of an economics course, for sale all over, becomes different from the student expectation of an economics course in a particular country and decade.
They told him that Fishman is the bald one at the front who looks like Phillip Larkin, but from my studies I know that Fishman is the one in tweed and serious specs at the back. The one trying to look like he's just come over from the UK to read the weather forecast. Howard Higman is the one in the middle. I don't know how to look-up the report to the US Senate Subcommittee that these professors were summoned to rebut. If anyone knows the link I hope they can add it as a comment to this blog post.
Fishman might have been summoned by mistake. Al Fishman, who shared some political interests, was an activist who criticised Senator Todd, but not a college teacher; Les Fishman was the Economics professor who the Colorado state university kept in the background on research projects and organising committees and encouraged to go to the UK. There were no further summonses and Senator Todd dropped-out of politics a few years later. The next piece of work was a report for the defence department on the re-employment of defence workers, published in 1968. It combined research from three different tyre companies and their redundant staff, and was written by a team headed by Fishman when he was not in the UK. There's a copy in an archive at Warwick Uni library. The archive at Warwick there records plans of a statistics laboratory from 1965 and a folder of press releases about 1968 states that it opened. This would have been a new generation of computers with reel-to-reel tape recorders and punched paper instead of punched cards in racks. They would have had teletype keyboards and the odd cathode ray screen. Fishman never mentions a computer again. Maybe he spilt coffee on it and was barred for life. Academics were asked to write something in honour of Les Fishman for the launch of the Fishman Bursary. There isn't much to go-on. I've put together what I can find on another page. One claimed to have found a good Fishman article from 1967 but doesn't give a reference. Maybe it was his inaugural lecture at Keele Uni, bound together with something similar and called "The Interconnected Economy" at £14.95 on Amazon. The paper referred-to is on the effects on the US economy of ending the Vietnam War, which I guess was something that genuinely interested Fishman after serving in the forces himself in the 1940s and then coming-out against war in the 1960s. I guess the same interest drew him to survey redundant tyre workers, to demonstrate how much the US economy could adjust to loss of military work. In 1969 someone from Warwick Uni in the UK tried co-writing something about council car clubs with him . I expect he added the algebra and co-operated on thoughts about how average costs of a car are lost to those who buy one and use it anyway. I can't remember him using phrases like "community centre" that come-up in the text. You need a special depressed tone of voice to say "community centre"; Fishman's style was more a style of pretended previous thought.
1969-88: Leslie Fishman's bottom gets a job at Keele University
Somehow, Fishman bluffed his way into a short period at Warwick Uni. where he lasted two years and then looked employable when applying to set-up a department at Keele under the constraint of having less than half a students' time and taking subject-switchers after their foundation year. Someone has written a history of Keele which says that a lot of applicants turned-down jobs like this when they realised what they'd applied-for. It was a job that would only attract someone who needed a job, someone who had always wanted to be a professor, and someone with a miraculous ability to look like an academic star rather than any ordinary job applicant who might have taught A-level at the college over the road and done the job a lot better. Fishman was all three, or all four - he had taught at a college for teenages in Idaho but it was supposed to be a degree course. He had also met the big names of American nerdy cold-war untrue economics and read their journals, he loved being a professor and he badly needed a job. He was also named as someone who did some work for Colorado State getting employment statistics while at Colorado State University and considered not safe to leave near students, and he should have had experience with computer stats. A memorial lecture states that he wrote a good article about the economic costs of Vietnam, which was not published on any of the sites listed by Jstor - maybe it wasn't published at all. Fishman's experience was a McJob at UCLA Berkley cramming students for a business administration course, two years at a college for older teenagers that started running the odd degree course (A-level in UK terms), a period based at Colorado of which two years are now remembered of him teaching, and two years at Warwick University. So he had a knack of holding down teaching jobs for two years, but not for applying for jobs; they had often been offered to him alongside government research contracts and a fellowship to do something-or-other at Oxford. His first permenant job had been one that not many other people would apply for, and Keele was similar because of the constraints of teaching such a compact course. A good applicant would offer a solution, nowadays under The Consumer Rights Act #49: "with reasonable care and skill The solution would be to recognise previous student work at A-level and somehow build it into the degree course; to take advantage of the students' bredth of study by offerning inter-departmental courses and tutorials to extract students' broad ideas, and to teach computing in order to condense the statistics part of a standard course. Fishman had the experience to share courses with the American Studies department and Industrial Relations department. He had computer stats experience. Warwick Uni had just set-up a statistics lab in the new digital computer style, with videos to train anybody who was interested in how to use the software. Fishman in his streak of good luck had studied punched-cards and tables of correlated data based on obscure Fortran program's interpretations of them at University of Boulder, Colorado. If he had wanted to do his job and learn the next generation of technology, he could have done so. He had the access pass. He could just walk-in. On the other hand there was nobody in a stats lab to do the work for him; he would have to take unpaid time and initiative and learn a new skill if he wanted to use computers. He chose not to. Fishman had less experience running tutorials, which was a pity in the UK system where they are normal, and when teaching students on broad courses who have ideas from other departments. He could have learned the knack, but he chose not to, and nobody noticed. Fishman even got away without doing tutorials or learning to type on the office computer by the time I was there nineteen years later. This was the time of Educating Rita. Academics were in short supply. Failings could be blamed on the stupidity of un-schooled local students who, in turn, did not know what to expect because their parents hadn't done similar courses. It was possible to get through meetings with peer-review people from other colleges, because their courses were and are probably awful too. In 1975 someone co-wrote a journal article: Defendant Sentences as a Function of Attractiveness and Justification for Actions
In a test of the hypotheses that ... (a) defendants who have high external justification for their behaviour would be sentenced less severely than defendants with low external justification and (b) an attractive defendant with low external justification would be sentenced more severely than an unattractive defendant, ... 60 American college students were randomly assigned without regard to sex to one of four treatments generated by two types of defendant descriptions (attractive vs. unattractive) and by two levels of defendant external justification (high vs. low: i.e., unspecified). Results confirmed both the predicted main effect for external justification (p < .05) and the defendant characteristics by external justification interaction (p < .05). Attractive defendants, therefore, were not inevitably treated more leniently than unattractive defendants.
The next twenty years were spent on an economic experiment. How long can economics teachers avoid the sullen stares of subject-mixing students who know how badly economics is taught compared to other subjects? Subject mixing was new to the UK. The better reasons for sullen stares are still not clear to economists, so they were probably less clear then. In 1984 a member of staff wrote a sane textbook, covering the subjects that economics students might want to study, and Les Fishman is thanked in the acknowledgements for reading a draft, as are students from the author's tutorial group at the time, but Fishman continued to teach what he thought he had to teach - "we have to teach this stuff in order to call this an economics degree", was his phrase, as though he knew. "This stuff" was macro-economics from his memories of the Samualson textbook using excerpts from something more modern like Begg, micro-economics from Laidler, and two hours a week of manual statistics. The bits in Begg that said that the traditional bits were untrue were left-out. There was another textbook Fishman knew about and probably had on his office shelf, next to the un-read sales brochures for Instat software. The book is still mentioned as a classic and covers the subjects I thought I had signed-up to study when I began an economics course, but was not allowed to study. The link is to a transcript free to read online. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix INTRODUCTION II
Your prospectus has a lot about "Quantitative Methods". Methods of what?
For 19 years you have pretended that computers don't exist in your stats teaching. That's a deliberate scam isn't it? There's no other word for it is there? Your secretary has Supercalc stats functions on this computer. Did you know that? Do you know how to turn it on? Do you have a computer in the department library? No? What do you have? Those ones for one exercise - really? So why do you still teach manual computing for two hours a week and keep Supercalc in the office?
What was that workbook with examples about broiler chickens? You mean they have "recitations" in US college courses? What's this thing you call a "class"? Really?
There are about 4 million people unemployed. Unemployment is the subject of your published books. Why do you think there are 4 million people unemployed? Why do you think so many factories have closed?
What do your students think of the course? Apart from showing they like it by passing the exam? Is that all you know about them? Can we see the exam scripts. Take this one: do you know the person's name? Anyone? So you don't remember them from tutorials? You mean you don't do tutorials? In that case, can you line them up outside your office door so we can see them? You mean they went home early? Do you know what any of them are doing next? None? Get some back for a Viva.
Who is the prime minister? What floor are we on? Can you count back in 7s ?
I doubt they asked that last question because in 1987 an economics degree course that taught theories in case anyone thinks of a use for them was quite normal, as it is now. The people who wrote the Levacic and Rebmann textbooks had held-down jobs at Open University and Middlesex Uni. Teachers don't start from relevant problems and find skills to solve those problems; it worked the other way around. Like teaching Latin and Greel in Victorean schools. There was a surplus of people with useless skills, so they were easy to hire as teachers, so a subject was taught even more to the next generation. The next person to get the Keele job was an expert in a new thing called "game theory" with a CV about studying maths. Fishman may have been a real person in the 1950s for real reasons but I don't remember him teaching in any useful way. I remember he had a good style and looked like a father figure to some people. He talked with glee. He liked to interrupt his own slow drawl with an anecdote. He professed how V-neck jumpers came-out in better colours every year. He professed that market researchers sliced data in different ways to get over-precise results, for example at Ford. He mentioned the Ford Motor Company of Detroit a few times, so I think he'd read a book about it or something. He stopped talking half-way through a micro-economics workbook example sentence - about Broiler chickens and marginal cost - because, as he explained, it was five o'clock. He professed that as you get older you find that nothing works quite so well. He professed that as a governor you need to maintain defence and after that comes welfare. He showed a bit of glee at discovering a Nigerian economics text book. He professed that Wedgwood had left the potters trade association, leading to rising sales costs for the other big potter companies. That's about all I remember because he did not hold the tutorials or provide the feedback to students as reasonably expected to do for high payment payment of salary from my taxes, I believe. Fishman interrupted a macro-economics revision lecture to say "we have to teach this stuff to call this an economics degree course in less than half your time". A lecture about the ISLM model of demand management in a closed economy. Fishman did not seem a real person in the way he taught economics in the 1980s. His 1950s Samuelson textbooks had not mentioned anything interesting about unemployment, so he didn't in 1984. By the last year in his career he used an A-level textbook called Begg which tried to add notes about current affairs and up to date research. He didn't tell us about them; they weren't in the exam. His colleagues pushed a bit into the course about differing ways to measure unemployment, which was controversial at the time, but I don't remember a single word from Fishman. He was on his last year of work. He could take phone calls in his seminars. He could have taught us that snails ran the universe to see if us exam-flunkers showed any interest in our sullen stares but no. He did not say a word about catastrophic economic policies that effected all the rest of us in the room. I hope some keen historian dredges-up the archives about this man to find-out how to stop the mistake happening again, because the problem is so much like the problem of people going to Oxford or Cambridge and studying PPE and then going-on to cause unhappiness from bad economics. It's a problem of people, on compacted economics courses that nobody much remembers, learning bad habits.
Economics teaching before student feedback - extra question for Keele: A recession caused by bad economists has wrecked a chunk of the economy, along with students' job prospects and those of their parents. £32,720 of tax money was paid to this economics department to research what happened next; how people got jobs if it all. The teacher doesn't mention a word about this. He doesn't run a course based on his research; he doesn't ask students to swap ideas about jobs. He doesn't give a lecture about whatever the £32,720 of tax money paid-for. Is this OK?Definitely agree Mostly agree Neither agree nor disagree Mostly disagree Definitely disagree Words fail me
Omitting Verse Three: the bit in the textbook that isn't taught
A digression about economics textbooks:
I have forgotten what I was going to say. Anyway, I am reading Begg's 1984 edition and find it a well-written, well-produced book for someone who knows what to make of it. The chapter on "risk" that ends with the stock market is worth passing-around to anyone interested. The next chapter, "welfare economics", says more about the things it is not allowed to say than anything interesting in the bits left-over. It looks as though the first college divided all the interesting ideas up between the departments, and the economics rep got to the meeting late and had to make-do with what was left-over. I am reading a lot of this for the first time and have not got to the end so shall move-on to another box.
A digression about economics textbooks: this is the neat, pretend-technocratic, pretend-neutral book that came out in 1948 in the US
</DIGRESSION ON ENDING-UP>
We faced forwards, as in an exam, and had no reason to speak; it was an embarassing place to be seen. Not as embarassing as London School of Economics, acording to Unistats, but still quite embarassing. I didn't know anyone on the three year course that taught a coach-load of students each year. There was a friend-of-a-friend who might nod or grunt or say hullo, and someone who hooked-up to compare revision notes at the end. That was it. No great surprise to a an ex-boarder with an anxiety problem and a purple leopardskin sweatshirt, but I don't think anyone else felt part of a student group committed to learning, so, in a way, the system made me more equal.
In English, I remember faces. In Economics and Computer Science, not: we faced forwards.
In English and Politics, I remember other peoples' contributions as you remember past colleagues. Scenes. Snatches of conversation. The person who was interested in Uncle books; the person from Nigeria who carried a copy of Cosmopolitan and worried about her weight.
"should you could ride a bicycle?"
"an excercise bicycle?"
That was politics
In English I got befriended by someone who was so straightforward about being friendly that, at that age, I had not yet learned how to be pompous and keep a distance and avoid opportunities. A monkey boy who let me follow him around. I even learned about how more sensible and more heterosexual people behaved, because he let me follow him into the study-bedroom of a clique sometimes, and listen to The Doors, and discuss the world. That kind of thing was much more important than learning how to be Chancellor of the Exchequor if I ever grew-up, but I was interested in both and wanted to feel part of a group of students committed to learning.
Economics students look different to English students. Most of them boys in my year. More local accents. Shorter hair and shorter names than English students. I exect that all economics students are called "Tim". They look like people who join a sports clubs, rather than people who listen to music. There are a lot of people at universities who look as though they belong to sports clubs, which is a bit wierd and I don't know why. Maybe they want higher education as an excuse to play sport, and it anyone questions the choice they quote the economics text book that says they'll be paid more later-on.
I remember looking at lists of universities - before flunking A levels - and saw that there was one which taught industrial design. Just one. Sharing a campus with a lot of trainee gym teachers for three years, which I guess is better than sharing with theology students, but not much better. Nor sharing a department with "management" in the title. If you have work experience, then the way organisations work is interesting. If you are a school leaver on a higher education course in management, then it could be useful but it's no good for attracting other students. It is not something you would mention on a dating agency. Nobody would expect to meet the next Jim Morrison in a department with "management" in the title.
Keele was advertised as offering mixed subjects, so I hoped to find a lot of eclectic people with odd points of view, but the prospectus mes-led: a lot of students skipped the foundation year, and opted for similar subjects like English & American Studies or Economics & Management Science, so the two groups didn't get to meet and spark ideas off each other. I suppose I was lucky not to have to share with theology students, which would have been worse.
I have been able to explore academic interests with other students.
I don't know what other economcis students thought about the wreck of the UK economy at the time, because it wasn't discussed. The course was set-up to avoid discussion, because, I suppose, in hindisght, any discussion would increase the chances of a lecturer getting sacked at University of Colorado in the 1960s, and the habits learned at that place were transferred to this place by the chief, Les Fishman.
<DIGRESSION ON POPPING THE QUESTION>
All I know is that people occasionally asked the lecturer if he knew why the government seemed to be closing UK industry so deliberately, just as they had done at school. The answer at school and in the innovation course at Keele was the same - that the sort of people who support those policies in government believe, privately, that UK manufacturing is dead anyway. The answer from Fishman was even more diplomatic -"We used to believe in Keynsian solution; now we believe in Monetarist solutions", and then, asked about the effects, he resorted to mime. "It'll be like a cold shower. [mimed shrug]. That's what the people who believe in these policies say"
</DIGRESSION ON POPPING THE QUESTION>
Where were we? Did I feel part of anything?
No I don't remember being part of a group of students committed to learning; I just remember boys in knitwear.
Teaching before student feedback - external reviews of 1980s Keele
Unemployment in the text books - there is more here
Chapter X:
Cow Theory of the Global North
The Leslie and Eleanor Fishman Bursary at Keele University
Recent National Student Survey questions, including optional follow-up questions and extra questions for NHS students. The questions can change a little each year
Quality Assurance Agency Benchmarks for Economics Degree Courses
introductions too long to put at the start
The way UK government treats manufacturing is still important to anyone selling UK-made products, because it's hard to explain that UK manufacturers were effected by fiddled-exchange rates.
students ... aware of how economics can be applied to design, guide and interpret commercial, economic, social and environmental policy. As part of this, they have the ability to discuss and analyse government policy and to assess the performance of the UK and other economies, past and present - Quality Assurance Agency benchmark .
Customers might know that Churchill joined the gold standard in the 1930s, closing a lot of UK manufacturing to achieve a near 25% non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, that the Luftwaffe closed a lot of it in the 1940s, and that Churchill ordered the Bletchley Park computer to be broken up after 1945, stunting a new industry before it started, and that councils tend to demolish a lot of workshop space on any pretext - even the Olympics. Customers don't know about the 1979-2009 blitz caused by a monetary policy of exchange-rate fiddling to promote cheaper imports, that journalists and politicians are still quite keen on the idea, and that alternatives like helping industry work well are not asked-for. Customers know that big orders from China are cheaper, but they don't know that there is a whole range of areas where UK manufacturers could make smaller quicker orders or specialised ones or sell direct to sympathetic customers to cut the costs of a shop. It just takes a patience for lead times and ability to buy what the factory is used to making. Nor are customers schooled to promote good government by buying goods from well-governed countries, rather than buying from countries where there is poverty that causes a population explosion and so goods made for next to nothing. I have a blog post about this after visiting a consensus-building exercise at Labour Behind the Label. Development economics is taught separately from the need for a welfare state in developing countries. Lastly, the word "welfare" is American; government ministers still have trouble understanding the main insurance-like role of the UK state. That is something that better economics courses could help them with.
Textbooks quote stuff which is simply wrong
While writing this blog post I bought a second-hand copy of the brick-thick 779-page textbook called Begg that we used on my 1980s degree. It's well-written for a narrow purpose. It would be a good backup to example-based lectures on the same subject taught at the same time. The micro-economics of one or two industries taught, chapter-by-chapter, alongside the introductory micro-economics in the textbook. Further up this page I give quotes where it seems to say one thing in order to fit-in with conventional teaching about unemployment or monetary policy, and then puts a completely different view that's much more important in a little-reach chapter later-on. The Times newspaper was written like that in the 1980s, after a new proprietor took-over and told the staff to agree with Thatcher. It would say "Unemployment getting better, says minister for employment", and then right at the end of the article it would say "blob: fact fact fact fact fact fact fact fact which all show that the article just above is rubbish".
Enabling student development and achievement: providers ... have in place, monitor and evaluate arrangements and resources which enable students to develop their academic, personal and professional potential. - Quality Assurance Agency expectation
Fed-up with Begg at college, I searched the book-shop and found two McMillan books for revision which looked more concise and grown-up. I was wrong on the second point; the more technical economics books are worse. They turned-up on my shelf, decades later, well-hacked with corners cut-off alternate chapter pages, post-it notes, highlighting in two colours and notes in the margins. Macro-Economics, an introduction to Keynesian-Neoclassical Controversies, by Rosalind Lecic and Alexander Rebman, second edition, with The McMillan Dictionary of Modern Economics to match. On p 346 my chosen textbook says "The analysis also implies that if the government attempts to bring down the rate of inflation, unemployment will temporarily rise above the natural rate if expected inflation adjusts with a lag". I wrote "cold shower metaphor" in the margin. Then it's got a bit of the usual prejudice blaming everything on workers and unions causing unemployment by asking for wages, rather than governments fiddling the exchange rate and workers having no control over badly-run companies nor a chance to set-up better ones. It's not very relevant to the UK economy where 1970s inflation had been caused by Arab oil price rises, as we now know in 2015 because falling oil prices keep it down. The textbook finds this monetary policy respectable: "real wages rise and employment falls". This was strikingly obvious in the early 80s, except for the real wage rises, "but as expected inflation falls the short run Phillips curve shifts downwards and the natural rate of unemployment is restored once actual and expected rates of inflation are equal". In the margin I wrote "unless your employer goes bust". The Begg textbook had un-mentioned chapters admitting that real life was different, but in this textbook the next paragraph is just called "The Keynesian counter argument", but it can't be very good because it's hidden behind algebraic shorthand or semaphore or such and I wrote "Duff" at the top. To read this is a bit like sitting in a civil war with two historians talking in your ears about how more nuanced arguments reveal different facets of whether either side are good or bad leaders; it's controversy to please the external course examiners, but not controversy to tell the students what to expect after college.
degree-awarding bodies use external and independent expertise at key stages of setting and maintaining academic standards to advise on whether UK threshold academic standards are set, delivered and achieved - Quality Assurance Agency expectationa graduate should ... demonstrate knowledge and awareness of the historical and policy contexts in which specific economic analysis is applied - Quality Assurance Agency threshold
Digression on one of the reasons to start writing
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Hilary Ben, James Purnell. Their regime and the generation of civil servants and courtiers within it were very keen on free trade at the expense of the welfare state, whether in Bangladesh where it needs setting-up, or the UK where it needs propping-up with less unfair competition from Bangladesh. So keen that they thought they ought to educate the public in underhand ways. These are people who pay taxpayers' money to explain economic falsehoods to the electorate with the technique of "social proof" provided by their favourite ad agency, Futerra. A much larger group of free-trade politicians at County Hall in London sponsored London Fashion Week, and when the Greater London Authority was set-up again, with a chance of European Regional Development Grant funding for any darn thing the mayor liked, Fashion and free trade were high on the list. Not employment of people in London - those were the little people. http://veganline.com/ethical-fashion-forum.htm is a guide to what happened next and still happens in similar ways, more or less, with each different government. In the 2000s an un-accountable inter-departmental dictat without minister's name or budget co-incided with the interests of a PR agency called Futerra that did a huge amount of governement work and the cross-ministry headings of work by the Crafts Council, the British Council, DEFRA, Department for International Development, Development Studies courses sponsored by UK taxpayers in countries like Bangladesh, The V&A Museum's exhibition of items including dresses from "Juste", a fictional dress company. A slush fund called London Development Agency, and another called the Higher Education Funding Council could find whatever fashion courses they wanted to fund and funded various ISSUU online publications as course materials for fashion students who were to be taught the new truth. A long sentence conveys my sense of information available or not available to taxpayers. Juste, Junky Styling, Pants to Poverty, Worn Again, Terra Plana, Ciel, Sari Dress Project and their trade association subsidised by a Bangladeshi trade association that in turn was subsidised by DfID was Ethical Fashion Forum. Which has a page urging people not to buy UK-made products on ethical grounds, for reasons including a pretended ignorance of the welfare state which has costs built-in to the price of every product made in the UK. These brands tried to work with another tax-paid-for slush fund called London Fashion Week, and a room called "estethica" was established which sounds a bit like "ethical" which means nothing because it is a word about types of other words rather than anything more specific. This excess of the 2000s decade is on the wane but there is a chance that I might meet some of its proponents, who used my tax cash to try to put me out of business, and a sense of where we are coming from might be useful. I worked-out that the fictional Juste brand was set-up to justify a second masters degree at Brooks Uni by someone who didn't have a first degree but brushed that under the carpet, along with the fictional nature of Juste. It was meant to be a dress company that was not certified as fair trade nor production in a welfare state like the UK, but some new meaningless category called just "ethical" - a word coined by someone working in central africa for a UN agency to do rather specialised things for which he could thnk of no precise word, and for which he did not need to think of a precise word because he got the subsidy anyway. I have sat in a room with a rep from London College of Fashion who said something like "I don't know how we got money for the fashion project in africa but it was very generous". I have emailed London Assembly Members to ask why the mayor was spending money in Shanghai rather than Shoreditch, and tried to get meetings through those assembly members with British Fashion Council, the taxpayer-funded PR outfit that runs the show. Given this wave of public-funded kamikazee economics, I was reminded of my own experience studying the subject at Keele, and became interested in the motives and backgrounds of these other people. Some of them seemed quite genuine in their beliefs after studying courses like Economics at UK universities. Now that their cause is out of fashion nobody can divert taxpayer money towards them in a legal way, there is probably no need for me to meet them, but this idea of trying to remember what I learned on a course decades ago came partly of that need - to find what I had in common with other ignorant people who had been on bad courses. As Ethical Fashion Forum went out of fashion and the "founder" lost her job, she emailed to suggest we meet. I would still like to meet, but my thaughts turned to what I could possibly say to the person. I would have to explain that my whole life had been formed by UK government policies to the exchange rate and industry. How could I start trying to explain that? So I have not yet met her, but wrote this blog post instead.
I would like to meet Rosalind Levacic, ex Open University, and Alexander Rebman, ex Middlesex Uni, to ask whether their courses were eventually closed-down for failing to demonstrate knowledge of the historical and policy context, and sticking to the fictional closed economy with a single workforce bidding for work which existed in the head of someone called Hicks in 1937 and it still talked-about seriously in their book. There are much more and important and obvious questions facing students in the lecture theatre - like jobs you can't get by bidding lower, or can't make a living it - and much more obvious causes of recession like a fiddled exchange rate, recessions in overseas markets, and the separate effects of north sea oil on the exchange rate. I suppose Levacic or Rebman would ask me why I paid for the book if I didn't want it, and it's hard to anticipate the conversation beyond that point but experience from my 1980s course is that they'd change the subject to Chi-squared and theta decimated to avoid the obvious. I didn't get a chance to meet Levacic and Rebman but I did find some obscure journal in the library which said something about the elasticity of unemployment for every-day jobs. Industrial Relations Bulletin of 1986 guesses that doubled unemployment had brought wages down 7-10% ; raised minimum wages, decades later, reduced employment by a rather small amount. There are lots of notes like this in the margin of my Levacic text book, some of them just saying "crap".
Digression on adding machines
Maybe the reason for squaring before averaging to get a standard deviation was to show that stats experts were a rank above book keepers who could use machines. Through the 1950s and 60s there were sheet-metal computers using the same technology as old-fashioned shop tills but without the pop-up numbers and the cash drawer. They were called adding machines. The grander ones were called accounting machines and could add, subtract, print on an account sheet, print the same numbers onto a rent book or a payment card, and the same again onto an account card. The cards had a notched bottom edge so you could lay them out in a special notched card trolly, showing the right hand column of each card. It was wonderful to watch. My dad had an accounting machine. They were made by Jubilee Engineering in Scandinavia I think, or Art Metal in the UK. The largest organisations like the US immigration department had a punched card system from firms like IBM that could be read by machine as well as printed. Leslie Fishman was an early user of SPSS software that used this kind of technology to read a database of punched cards at University of Colorado. The software ran on ICL or IBM unix machines like the mainframe at Keele. At the modest end of the market, people used adding machines to fill-in carbon-paper duplicate spreadsheets by hand in deadbeat jobs like working for a housing association. Stonham Housing Association still used them in the 80s. There were special printed sheets and called Gilbert Sheets with special chrome and leather clip boards, or English Churches Housing used Kalamazoo. I suppose that maths teachers wanted to show-off the squaring scales on slide rules with the fancy calculations like squares and square roots for standard deviation.
Digression about Newton and Pythagoras
The grand tradition of economics is also bad; of no interest to people who have done an A-level and want to learn more. I don't know what the tradition is precisely - nobody does - but I know that it is bad and think that students are misled when they sign-up and that's why they give bad scores for "staff made the subject interesting" - even more than students of pharmacy or accountancy, because economics students expected something else. They get a tradition of hard mathematical science; a tradition of teaching that Newton invented gravity because he was a genius, and Pythagoras invented the number three-and-a-bit because he was a genius, and you student had better darn learn this daft story as you learn religion from the preacher-man and his big book with the crosses on it. If you have your own idea in this scheme, it isn't true until peer-reviewed in a journal; students are asked to copy the textbooks if they want a qualification. Textbooks copy the journals and journals are written by academics who want a job or to increase Keele Economics Journal Ranking for some pointless reason. It's a self-referential system.
Digression about science teaching
I did a science subject at school, called Nuffield Physics, and it was good. On the Nuffieldfoundation.org web site see Teachers > Secondary > Physics and click on a subject like "waves" to see what I mean. We learnt wave patterns (electrical magnetic and physical - they're the same) from our own weights and springs. The course should have thrown-in some music theory as well. We needed special help from the teacher for nuclear physics. The Nuffield Foundation had commissioned polystyrene ping-pong balls the right size so that when glued into an atom shape and revolved on a turntable, they reflected microwaves in the same way as early experiments into nuclear physics. We also learned that when someone resorts to shorthand algebra to explain something, they're bluffing. They're making a simple thing complicated. There's no need. I think this could be why music technology gets bad reviews in colleges nowadays: students know wave patterns from electronics courses, see the same again in music theory courses, and see somone messing around with jargon and shorthand instead of combining the two. The grand tradition has its own history in each subject - often a great one. The scientific method is great. But Mr Doherty, the Eng. Lit. teacher in leather trousers taught us that there were Augustans and Romantics, and that the Augustan idea of knowledge and teaching was a bit like a letterbox: knowledge is posted-in at the start of the course to make sure it has a chance to get there; at the end of the course it is examined whether this knowledge remains in the letterbox. Somehow this differed from the Romantic idea of knowledge in the Eng. Lit. Augustans and Romantics course that's more about people discovering what is in themselves already. I wish Mr Doherty, the Eng. Lit teacher, had explained this to Mr Fishman, the Economics teacher, but now they are both dead; it's up to us who read this. (Side-track: they probably had odd job titles. End of side-track). Oh, I read that the Department of Education has interered in their three exam board's science syllabuses. After seeing what they did for grammer, I suppose they interfere for the worse.
Digression on journal articles
Take the question of what people do after college. https://www.hesa.ac.uk/free-statistics has some of the stuff you'd expect; you'd expect really good economists to have some special way of writing about the data or obtaining it or generally be good at something. http://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9312204.pdf is a the first example that came-up of an economics journal article. It's a bamboozelement exercise written, I guess, to increase one college's statistics for staff writing in academic journals. I don't know what the algebra means. I think that students, like Nuffield Physics students, should be able to opt-out of this game and do something more sensible under a slightly different name, like "sensible economics"; there should be no need to understand what the algebra means, before deciding that it's not useful. Just as there should be no need to understand what's in a homoeopathy degree before deciding not to study homoeopathy, theology, or anything stupid.
Digression on post-crash economics
Post-crash economics is a new phrase for an old frustration, and this post looks twice as long as it really is because it peters-out and then shows pinched-and-pasted stuff from the post crash economics society at the end. Thirty years after I was at college, Internet learning has got way better but face-to-face teaching has fewer hours in the timetable. Some teachers still use the those hours as an excuse for teaching textbooks rather than facts and shorthand algebra rather than reasons, and some college managers ignore bad reviews because their budgets make so much money from this cheap-to-run bad economics degree course. Students are using the internet to discover what course is worth the trouble but discover that the newspaper economics league tables are simply wrong - terrible courses and good ones co-exist among different subjects at the same colleges, while the league tables tend to average-out the scores and put the same colleges at the top and bottom of each table. I hope that students kill the algebra-fetish courses that do so much damage by giving bad reviews or asking questions before choosing the course, so that something better can take their place. I hope that future teachers help students discover economics, rather than learn it from a work-book, if it's quicker to teach that way. Break The Guardian reports polite protest by students at a syllabus that is divorced from the real world, as does BBC Radio 4. If the material taught isn't bad enough, the way it's taught is "£9,000 lobotomy" at courses like the one at Glasgow University. What they don't say is that it is a scam. It charges £9,000 to first year students from England and Wales to play with a computer and hand-in an essay that gets 100% for being handed-in on time. For some reason, journalists choose plumbers as examples of scam-merchants rather than universities or trades unions. It is much easier to prove bad service from a plumber and much harder to prove bad service from an economics department charging £9,000, so they are not quoted on Rogue Traders where they belong.
Digression on overly mathmatical economists
Professional economics .. is very, very mathematical. This is true both for theoretical economics, which involves a lot of theoretical maths, and for applied economics, which involves a lot of number crunching of one sort and another. - Tim Leunig of the LSE writing in The Guadian, 2008 This begs a question: why don't economists use a computer? I suppose they do, so the computer programmer does the detailed maths and the economist just has to learn to use the program and make sense of it. The same article suggests that economists aren't well educated. Today many people call for restrictions on trade, even though every economist worth that title knows that free trade is good for both sides in almost all circumstances. Similarly many aid groups call for policies that will immiserate the very people they claim to want to help. Many people support those calls because they know so little about how the economy works, and people in the developing world are poorer as a result. That statement strikes me as ignorant. Free trade between a welfare state, with high social insurance costs, and another country with lower costs, can't work very well. The problem is made worse because very poor people tend to cope by having a lot of children, partly to look after them in old-age, and partly because the girls aren't at secondary school. Add to that the complications of manipulated currencies - often manipulated on economic advice - and export subsidies that exist in countries like Bangladesh - and you get an economic disaster which this economist has no idea about. He doesn't even know that he has no idea.
Digression on Keele buildings
"enforced... reduction of student numbers ... despite peak demand"was part of the package of cuts. I suppose it was based on buildings. Colleges owned a lot of rabbit hutches to put students in. I guess the reduction was down to the level that the college would house, to avoid reports of wasted rooms. Keele had some good rooms built in the 70s were asked to stretch budgets, called the Z-blocks. They had breeze block walls without plaster, emulsioned, with a plastic duct at picture-rail heightto connect wall lamps and a bathroom string-pull to turn them on or off. At the same time the rooms were big and the kitchens and bathrroms were shared between small numbers. I've not seen that style anywhere else since but it is a good style to copy and seek-out I think. Monastic. Maybe they should be listed. There were others with white-painted brick walls lit from the side, which always look good.
Someone had been on a course at Warwick. Apparently their rabbit hutches took students of the same year-group and put them together, to increase the chance of near-strangers deciding to go to films or meals together once in a while. Keele didn't have that system.
One year, I was a cool person. A house share off-campus, which was unusual at the time. It didn't go well because housing benefit for students was cut-back a bit while we were on it, and I didn't really understand the system, but - hey! - I was a cool person for one year and it went well for part of the year.
Free Bonus Afterthought: the worst degrees make most money
Digression on how this blog post comes about
I sometimes blog about bad economics. That reminded me that once, years ago, I did an economics and english degree with short courses, so I wondered: "what did I learn?" for two or three reasons.
One: I discover that others have the same frustration, hoping to study the economic crisis outlined in Robert Peston books and how politicians respond, but finding a course of computer multiple choice tests about X-shaped diagrams. I had a very similar frustration during the 1980s pillage of UK manufacturing that continued till 2009 in application of exchange-rate fiddles meant to reduce inflation, and continues to the time of writing in application of free-trade theory to countries with lower costs for the lack of a welfare state and because this leads to a population explosion.
This is relevant to my job of trying to sell UK-made footwear.
Two: Oxford Economics publishes reports commissioned by the Greater London Authority to justify crap like the Olympics or "The Value of Fashion", a long pdf document about why the Greater London Authority should spend money on PR for frocks rather than regional development of job prospects as suggested in the name of the EU grant they spend, which is called "regional development grant" not "taxpayer-funding for Chinese frocks grant", which has the opposite effect I think. Oxford Economics give away an Excel macro for double-checking their figures, and I hope one day to download it and learn how to use it for just that purpose.
Three: I wonder how to present myself to lobby groups promoting opposite opinions, namely supporters of free trade with Bangladesh, subsidies to better Bangladeshi employers, diversion of EU regional development grants to the London region towards boosting the same, and a similar but more generic and less micro-managed economic policy for China or Vietnam or any other country in the world that's cheap because of over-population caused by the lack of a welfare state. One solution is to expose these groups as lobby groups, but another is to try to suggest a better solution, and for that purpose I need to look like a real person with real reasons for coming to a point of view. Those who write web sites to promote concepts like "ethical fashion" come to this form a different angle to me, but share a vague aquainance with economic theory; they quote phrases like "comparative advantage". If I can put by economic training online, without pretension, that can only be good.
Free bonus afterthought: what did a Belstaff motorbike jacket look like?
IBond Buggies were made in Tamworth until production ceased before the 1979 change in economic policy, so maybe economic policies are not to blame for every failure of manufacturing. I think Belstaff did close during the 1980s recession so they'd be a better example to quote. There were also some posh pot makers who kept going with their chintz and figurines, and a factory making cast steel parts for bicycles.
Macro economics ought to cover why politicians have so much difficulty spending money on insurance-like services, such as social care, rather than paying for things best done in the private sector like paying for interesting pointy things and bond buggys.
Free bonus afterthought: how long should you hold a grudge?
I had forgotten most of Keele University's economics teaching except the good bits, which is what human beings to do. The filter that helps you survive day-to-day is different to the filter that helps you survive when looking-back, and I'm only looking back because unable to do a bit of software now at age 50 and do this as a distraction. But now I re-discover memories, the question comes-up: is it good to dredge-up a name after 30 years? A witty man who had done a boring job for decades? Easy compared to criticising people who are still alive and even employed at Keele, for their sake and mine because they might have better memories, better records, answer-back and prove me wrong about something which would be hard work on both sides. Fair because my dad did a degree, I did a degree, people I know have done degrees, and I think I have some background idea of expectations when I check them against the bureaucratic benchmarks. 1980s Keele economics was different to my background idea and different to the benchmark. Some lectured or taught well, but the course was as described above. If the boss with his MI5-recorded background has left lots of records to say why, that would be a really good thing for somebody to research when these records reach the National Archive in a few decades. Reason says: this is necessary because education is a bit like restoring old cars - great when it is done well and awful when done badly because it is hard to sue for something so vague as bad education or a bad second hand car. Therefore the world needs reviews of people who restore second hand cars just as it needs reviews of educators. There is a review system between colleges. I'd like to see a few reviewers from different types of course, just to stop on discipline like Economics falling so far behind the standards of others. Gut feeling says: more please. I am angrier now, with perspective, than I was in 1983 when my "attitude has been noted by all members of the department", starting with Dr Johns while the syllabus and teaching style was set by a bluffer called Professor Les Fishman who probably fiddled his CV and did as much as possible by teaching Samuelson by wrote. My gut feeling is angry with the peer review teachers from other colleges who saw the scam and wrote "don't close this course just yet - they have a problem with lack of timetable space and choose to spend two hours a week teaching manual computation of stats years after computers have become domestic appliances, so it's difficult for them". It is not difficult. There is no excuse for teaching manual computation in 1985. I want to know the names of the people were who signed-off this course as OK and how bad their courses were if they thought this was pretty typical. My gut feeling is angry with college management with their funny job titles and nasty treatment of students, for thinking it was OK to allow this man to continue in post. They were also the people who took over the student union building the year I left, apparently, and had it decorated like McDonalds, so they are clearly unpleasant people in the judgements they make, but even so they should have had some system for finding out if this course was a rip-off to students. Social awkwardness says: one teacher at Keele is still working from the time I was there and one or two are retired. Lots of people do little bits of work at colleges like teaching one bit of a course or one lecture or supervising MA students and I know nothing about any of those people. It's awkward, but constructive feedback is welcome. Politics says: this post ought to be about Alan Walters, the economist who closed so much UK manufacturing. Somehow, that disaster of a man gained credibility as a government advisor more powerful than the chancellor, on the back of a stupid job like teaching economics in the USA. Somehow, he is still remembered with a filter of denial, just as Fishman is still remembered with a filter of denial at Keele. If anyone ever tried to be one of Alan Walters students and can write something like this, they'd do the world a favour.
Footnote:
*M1 M2 M3 and M4 are the short money supply titles as well as motorways. Banchees Leprechauns Pookahs and Dullahans are the longer titles. There is no doubt that these things exist, but some doubt as to how much they influence events. I think one of the Keele lecturers wrote a short paper to show mathmatically that one of them is nothing to do with anything.
https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2012/10/leslie-fishman-writings.html has as many references and quotes as I can find for Leslie Fishman, including a 5,800 word article and being part of a team to make a 1960s punch-card database on unemployment statistics for reading by computer.
Odd cut-and-paste quotes from Thorsten Veblen on learning. Paragraph breaks are stripped-out by mistake. Even to-day there are such things in the usage of the learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation, and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees, dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a scholarly apostolic succession. And as commonly happens with mediators between the vulgar and their masters, whether the masters be natural or preternatural, he found it expedient to have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon the vulgar the fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might ask of them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. So far as they possess them, the lower and less reputable branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed these things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence among the practical schools, without the sanction of the continued example of the higher and classic grades, would be highly improbable, to say the least. nice quote about thrift and industriousness here there is some tendency latterly to substitute the captain of industry in place of the priest, as the head of seminaries of the higher learning. The substitution is by no means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of institutions are best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with a high degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less pronounced tendency to in trust the work of instruction in the higher learning to men of some pecuniary qualification. Administrative ability and skill in advertising the enterprise count for rather more than they once did, as qualifications for the work of teaching. This applies especially in those sciences that have most to do with the everyday facts of life, and it is particularly true of schools in the economically single-minded communities. This partial substitution of pecuniary for sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern transition from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as the chief means of reputability. The correlation of the two facts is probably clear without further elaboration.
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Coldwar economists were the sort of people who do well after original thinkers get the sack. I expect there are a lot like that are teaching in Turkey now, and a Turkish student can update this list about tactical, careerist people who work well with their funders. Government social work contractors are a bit like this - full of people who have never done anything wrong because they have never done anything.
Design Centre exhibit of how many components they had saved. The people who bought the brand when the factory closed still write that these are "the first washing machines in the world to harness quartz technology for increased precision. This made the Servis Quartz one of the most advanced and reliable washing machines of its time. In fact some Quartz machines are still going strong today, over 30 years later." "They won an award from the Design Centre", I say, in solidarity with my fellow student protester, because this is obviously about macro-economics and I'd seen the Servis exhibit at the Design Centre in London. Fishman knows about the Design Centre. He's written an article for the people who run it. "Oh. - I don't know", says Fishman out of his arse To quote an obituary, Fishman loses "any chances he had of reaching academic stardom" in my eyes. Apparently his generation of US economists could all be stars if they had a reasonable amount of talent. They pretended to have been the first to have discovered loads of rather obvious facts to write in Econometrica and called it a subject, in which professors found it bad for their careers to refer to anything outside economic journals. They would use the phrase "in economics", as in "autism has a different meaning in economics". I suppose if an economist had written to Econometrica that he wore a hat, then, "in economics", he would count as the person who discovered hats and be a great man. Another Fishman obituary quotes what happened if you asked someone from this background a question that wasn't answered in the text book: "I don't believe you have the right to ask me that question. I have the right to freedom of association..."
The London School of Economics (LSE) runs one of the most selective courses; it has most control over which students suit the course best and are allowed to sign-up. These same students rank it bottom of the charts for satisfaction. LSE ability to select students for the course is on left of the diagram; LSE student satisfaction with their chosen course is on the right. The bars chart relative scores to other economics degrees; the number is an absolute number mixed-up from some Unistats scores, and published in the Complete University Guide charts online in I think 2015 or 2016. A more detailed search in 2017, taking the single-subject degree, shows about the worst reference that students give anywhere. Obviously, they can't see past feedback acted-on. If they could see that, the course would have closed, although 30% are naturally loyal and lie on the form and say that it's clear how past feedback has been acted on. 46% believe that staff want to act on student feedback - so that's the liars plus another 16%. The feedback isn't just asking for easier work either - only 67% believe they are prompted to do their best work. Nor is it a question of the subject being naturally hard. Students are only 74% stimulated by the choice of material on the syllabus, even though they chose to study something called economics, and they are only 60% interested by its presentation. A third think the system of marking is agreed in advance, or that they can see past feedback acted-on, 40% think they are part of a community of staff and students. About half think they know what's coming next and how to choose the next module. Two thirds think they can apply a breadth of knowledge from different areas or study one subject in depth, but less than that - 53% - think they can even apply what they have learned, so presumable "depth" means more and more un-applied theory. It is clearly a course that should close.
More recently, a quango has had some funding to draft discussion points for the subject that it sometimes called "expectations" without any legal force beyond the sale of goods and services act if the course isn't described properly and offers something else, but they are default discussion settings for "those involved in the design, delivery, or review of programmes of study of economics", or "a prospective student or current student". I guess they're mainly used by external examiners. The points describe loose "threshold" and "typical" levels, which I imagine like the amber & green of a traffic light that you need to pass to get a degree. The implied sentences mean something like this
students. Professors get a double cell and someone to use as their bitch in the gulag under the campus (someone told me that and then gave me a funny look). It is not easy to compare to academic job prospects now. Usually you have to do something like teaching well, writing well, having another relevant career so you can say how things are done, being part of the Freemasons or the casting couch. In Fishman's case it wasn't the casting couch so the next thing to check his writing on Google Scholar's links to Jstor journal library. He taught about economic history leading up to current US growth rates, or at least he had the notes to hand because he worked them up into nearly 5,900 words 1960. It was quite a polished set of lecture notes, published in a journal for long articles. The paper would not have scored good marks on Fishman's own course, later-on at Keele, because it mentions original ideas in the final section which would have been marked wrong, but this is a tolerant journal. Another paper is titled "Is Higher Education a Hoax?". Then Econometrica reported him at the American Economic Society conference held in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1961. Fishman's name just has an asterisk next to it. He was given the last slot on a Tuesday afternoon to present his paper, after some grander macro-economics and a someone who loved algebra. Someone else who write about elasticity of demand for synthetic rubber got an asterisk too. Maybe their paper was too practical and immediate. Most people might have liked them; Idaho students might have liked them. They might have got published an Ebay Seller Guide or a piece in Plastics and Rubber Weekly, but they didn't get journal ranking peer-reviewed journals. The rule is: either you discover sacred texts buried under a tree in a biscuit tin, or you get published in a peer-reviewed journal if you want a college teaching job. I hope that he and the synthetic rubber person consoled each other. It was no problem because Fishman could do grand prose about economic history, he could keep an audience's attention in a lecture hall, and he could work on technical government jobs. The problem that would come-up was tutorials. He could tell his daughter that "I have the right to freedom of association", but it could break the flow of discussion if students asked him the same thing every week. If it was possible to be a professor and not do tutorials, Fishman had a good reason to avoid them. The Ford Foundation temp. job at Cambridge came very soon after getting work at Boulder. This suggests that economics college teachers were in demand, that Fishman had a certain knack, and that tutorials were not a big deal at Boulder; you wouldn't plan to jet-set around the world and leave a UK tutorial group with a new teacher. Keele students know that most UK colleges have three terms a year and most US ones have two, so the dates wouldn't have fitted. That's a pity for Fishman and his students because he missed the satisfaction by knowing what happened to them during a year and he missed their common sense and mess-ups and obvious questions. I guess that tutorial students can bring an economics tutor down to earth. I guess that this post-war anglo-american subject of economics lacks common sense because so many people have taught it without running tutorials. Fishman's daughter says he was "headhunted" to Boulder and "won" a Ford Foundation grant to do something at Cambridge. Was it the Freemasons? In a way, yes. This is someone else's account of being offered a chance to teach at Boulder. He discovers the american emphasis on lectures. IBond Buggies were made in Tamworth until production ceased before the 1979 change in economic policy, so maybe economic policies are not to blame for every failure of manufacturing. I think Belstaff did close during the 1980s recession so they'd be a better example to quote. There were also some posh pot makers who kept going with their chintz and figurines, and a factory making cast steel parts for bicycles.
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