Journeys up the property ladder: ‘I know that I am just so lucky’

westernpromise

I had to laugh at the arithmetic error. Inability to recognise an obvious error is the norm among current graduates in my experience as a hirer of them. I think it's because they rely on calculators and have never acquired an innate sense of whether an answer is about the right size or not.

One point I have mentioned before that can't be stressed too much is that prior to 1988, wives were treated as a line item on their husbands' tax return. They had no personal allowance (instead, he had a higher Married Man's Allowance), and their entire earnings were taxed at their husbands' marginal rate.

My father was quite well-paid by 1970s standards, so that had my mother worked, all her earnings would have gone into his 83% tax bracket. In other words, of every £6 she earned, £5 would have been taken in tax. Probably she would have spent more than all of what was left to her on things like travel to work, clothing for work, and outsourcing anything she no longer had the time to do (laundering duvets or whatever). So quite rationally, she didn't work.

Mortgage lenders took this into account, and the result was the old 3-times-main-salary or 2-times-main-and-1-times-second salary formula. This rightly recognised that, given the way she was treated in the tax system, a wife's salary was basically worthless in a lot of cases, and worth at best very much less than a husband's in most others. Between being paid less and taxed more there was nothing left of it to support mortgage repayments, so the lending multiples contructively ignored it.

As a result there was little to no difference in buying power between singletons and couples.

Ignorance of this bit of historical tax injustice is the reason you hear bleating about "why aren't house prices 3 x my salary?" Well, if we expropriated women's wages pre-1988-stylee, I guess they soon would be 3 x one salary. But the fairly-taxed dual-income household is now the default, is with us forever, and represents a structural change supporting permanently higher house prices.

danothy

westernpromise wrote: »

I had to laugh at the arithmetic error. Inability to recognise an obvious error is the norm among current graduates.

Funny that it was a graduate that recognised it then, isn't it? Don't bother answering that, I already know it's hilarious.

Carl31

westernpromise wrote: »

I had to laugh at the arithmetic error. Inability to recognise an obvious error is the norm among current graduates in my experience as a hirer of them.

I really wouldn't dwell too much on my poor maths, i was at work and working on numbers in £000's at the time

I don't think my error on an internet forum is an indicator of the entirety of the graduate population of the UK's ability to do maths in the workplace

mwpt

Carl31 wrote: »

I really wouldn't dwell too much on my poor maths, i was at work and working on numbers in £000's at the time

I don't think my error on an internet forum is an indicator of the entirety of the graduate population of the UK's ability to do maths in the workplace

Yes, we've heard it all before. Always the new generation is somehow less superior or worthwhile than "in my days". It's a common fallacy.

Also, I wouldn't put much weight on some comments by a smug property investor suffering from hindsight bias and exhibiting severe egocentrism + (illusory bias).

I must admit, I have very low tolerance for smug people, so much so that his posts were actually getting under my skin and I had to put him on ignore.

princeofpounds

I had to laugh at the arithmetic error. Inability to recognise an obvious error is the norm among current graduates in my experience as a hirer of them.

If one person is stupid, you can blame in individual, perhaps. If a class is stupid, you can blame the school, perhaps. If an entire generation is stupid, you can be pretty sure it's the fault of the parenting generation.

danothy

princeofpounds wrote: »

If one person is stupid, you can blame in individual, perhaps. If a class is stupid, you can blame the school, perhaps. If an entire generation is stupid, you can be pretty sure it's the fault of the parenting generation.

I'd be inclined to think that if someone is only seeing people who routinely make basic arithmetic errors applying for the jobs they are hiring for then it's likely the job prospects they are offering are poor and thus systematically attracting poor applicants.

westernpromise

danothy wrote: »

I'd be inclined to think that if someone is only seeing people who routinely make basic arithmetic errors applying for the jobs they are hiring for then it's likely the job prospects they are offering are poor and thus systematically attracting poor applicants.

No, they're very good jobs. We don't hire freshly-minted grads straight from university, but we do take them with a year or so of work under their belts. We pay them about £30k and if they're any good they go to about £55k within a year or two. I think £55k a year for a 25-year-old is quite good money.

If they're not good, then that doesn't happen, but they've got a good company added to their CV and the sector is lively, so they just leave instead for a pay rise.

The kind of arithmetic most applicants can't do involves questions like "What's the square root of 256, roughly?" In asking this, I figured everybody knows 12 x 12 = 144, and 20 x 20 = 400, so an educated guess at the root of a number between 144 and 400 would be somewhere between 12 and 20. Not a bit of it! When I first asked a few of them this they hadn't a clue. So I made it easier by asking what the square root of 144 was, instead. When they still couldn't answer that either, I was forced to conclude they either didn't know what a square root was, or didn't know their twelve times table.

A candidate with a A in A-Level maths which had allegedly included statistics was once unable to tell me what percentage of a range of normally-distributed values falls more than three standard deviations from the mean. When told it was 0.3% and then asked how many days 0.3% of the days in year are, she didn't know that, either. I never did find out what she did know.

I have even given up asking 11+ Numeracy questions, because even those are beyond most graduates. An example of such a question that graduates cannot do is "Without using a calculator or a pencil and paper, what is the sum of all the numbers between 0 and 100?" My daughter answered that question correctly in an 11+ interview, but I have yet to meet the non-maths graduate who can answer it correctly in a job interview.

It matters because somebody may have all the right orderly habits in the world and may check their work meticulously, but it's all for naught if they don't notice obvious errors.

I should add that I'm a mere English graduate so it's not like I'm asking non-specialists to attain a special level of expertise. I just expect them to notice that £10 x 52 does not make £5,200 so that they don't make themselves look foolish trying to make something of it.

danothy

westernpromise wrote: »

No, they're very good jobs.

The kind of applicants you claim to be getting reflects more on the prospects you are offering than the quality of the wider population of graduates, of which those who don't apply you necessarily know nothing of.

westernpromise

danothy wrote: »

The kind of applicants you claim to be getting reflects more on the prospects you are offering than the quality of the wider population of graduates, of which those who don't apply you necessarily know nothing of.

If I'm paying £55k for a 25-year-old I'm at the top end of the pay scale for graduate employment. What I am seeing *is* the cream.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say I'm only seeing muppets because I'm paying rubbish and also argue that I'm seeing muppets because everybody would want one of these jobs.

Can you answer that 11+ question, by the way? Without cheating?

danothy

westernpromise wrote: »

If I'm paying £55k for a 25-year-old I'm at the top end of the pay scale for graduate employment. What I am seeing *is* the cream.

Can you answer that 11+ question, by the way? Without cheating?

No, you're seeing who applies. Offering a high wage doesn't limit the applications to the "cream", and being well paid doesn't make the job a good one.

Incidentally, yes, I know how to add up the first 100 integers, either by pattern or by formula (and hence more generally a sequence of the first n integers), as well as being familiar with the normal distribution, square numbers, and understanding why you might ask what 0.3% of a year is. But no, I'm not applying for a job, hence you don't see the decent graduates.