The awful truth: education won't stop the west getting poorer - The Guardian

abaxas

ILW wrote: »

All depends on the area, nice little Kent village does not want a load of flats being built so chavs can be shipped in.

Who exactly is going to work in those shops?

Every wondered why your post office closed?
The local pub is on it's last legs?

ILW

abaxas wrote: »

Who exactly is going to work in those shops?

Every wondered why your post office closed?
The local pub is on it's last legs?

The place I am thinking of has one shop and 4 pubs.
The shop is family run with a few part timers who are locals.
The pubs are all thriving, mainly due to keeping their prices high to discourage the wrong type of clientelle.
It is also only a 15 minute drive from the nearest town and 30 minutes by train from central London.
The last thing a place like that needs is large industrial units or council flats.

Sadly I could not afford to live there.

abaxas

We had a classic is NIMBYisb recently.

People were actively against the expansion of a local chip board factory, which ironically used most of the wood from the local woodland.

People then complained when the woods were going to be sold off.

If the original complain had been upheld, there would have been little or no use for the commercial woodland.

Catch 22. Jobs and woodland, or no jobs and no woodland.

But the nimbys campaigned for no jobs and woodland, which was impossible!

Mr_Mumble

The Guardian piece is nonsense.

Guardian_article wrote:

This is not a blip, nor the result of educational shortcomings. In the US, which introduced mass higher education long before Britain, the average graduate's purchasing power has barely risen in 30 years.

IMF: US GDP based on purchasing-power-parity per capita in current international dollars (1980-)

A near quadrupling over the past 30 years.

Perhaps the caveat of graduates is of import but I somehow doubt they're starving and its non-graduates who're buying all those iPhones and 60" LCD TVs.

Being charitable to the author perhaps he is getting mixed up between purchasing power and real-income growth stagnating, which has been a recent discussion point amongst economists. These graphs (sourcing the BEA), while showing a 70% increase in real disposable income over the past 30 years, do show the sluggishness over the past five.

This publication from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis investigates the ruses used by media to mislead and scaremonger about income.

I can't be bothered to point out all the silly statements. Some quickies:

1. Read Marx, really? It would be a more fruitful enterprise reading the collected works of Asheron.

2. "A chip designer in India costs 10 times less than a US one." Wayne Rooney gets paid 100x as much as any Indian footballer, is the red shrek going to be replaced? If an Indian chip designer is so skilled they'll be emigrating to work for ARM, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Imagination Tech et al who are so far ahead in CPU/GPU design its frightening, the Japanese can't compete in this area how are Indians supposed to? If you're designing a simple integrated circuit for an embedded system perhaps your job is at risk but these jobs are usually for niche high value purposes so employees are protected in other ways.

3. "...nor the result of educational shortcomings". No discussion or counterpoints. With Britain slipping down international education league tables why the blind adherence to British education standards? Mentioning the obvious: education is largely state-provided so doubleplusgood in the Guardian's eye, also, where are you to find a greater density of Guardian viewspapers than teachers lounges?!

Economics is not a matter of deciding on how to cut a stagnant pie. The Chinese and Indians getting wealthier should make us richer too. 'Westerners' didn't become paupers when Japan provided us with pocket calculators, Walkmans and superior cars. Many individuals and families had to adapt but that's progress and change for you. Homo sapiens would still be living in caves chucking spears at beasts if the left-wing fantasy of folks having to suffer for others to gain were true.

B_Blank

Times, guardian, telegraph are all opinionated rags designed for the WOW factor in a similar way that the mail, sun etc are too. They are all full of joke articles which cant be taken seriously.

Read the FT, only paper which reports the facts. I didnt even read this whole thread because I saw it was about a guardian article and I dont see the point debating trash from people who dont have a clue, and whose job is to sell papers by making explosive headlines

StevieJ

Radiantsoul wrote: »

If the BRIC Countries are really able to climb into higher value adding activities it must offer massive rewards for the world. For the last five centuries most intellectual development has been undertaken by the populations of the USA, Western Europe and the sparsely populated Oceania. Bringing more countries into knowledge production should lead to a vast increase in intellectual progress.

I think China and the Middle East have previously done their bit for scientific advancement, maybe it moves around.

StevieJ

B_Blank wrote: »

Times, guardian, telegraph are all opinionated rags designed for the WOW factor in a similar way that the mail, sun etc are too. They are all full of joke articles which cant be taken seriously.

Read the FT, only paper which reports the facts. I didnt even read this whole thread because I saw it was about a guardian article and I dont see the point debating trash from people who dont have a clue, and whose job is to sell papers by making explosive headlines

I thought that the FT was a Brown/Labour supporting paper according to some on here.

Mr_Mumble

StevieJ wrote: »

I thought that the FT was a Brown/Labour supporting paper according to some on here.

The FT did support Labour from 1992 (Neil Kinnock!) until 2010. There is an important delineation between the FT's Guardian-lite news reporting and its, usually, superb financial coverage.