Are degrees in the UK value for money?

Gymbob

westernpromise wrote: »

It's fair because you're the "rich", you bast@rd. Your money is to be taken off you and given to vermin.

:rotfl:I'm far from that mate, even being on that amount would mean I'm still far from that :A::beer:

GreatApe

Arklight wrote: »

That's funny because I would say the exact opposite. It's typically the Right that sees money as a number, apparently unaware that it actually only buys labour. As the working classes typically do most of the labour some of them found it unfair they got so little of the money.

The fundamental problem with the left is that they seem to think 1 hour of worked time is universally valuable when it clearly is not. The free market types think let millions of people transacting freely set wages/value while the command and control types think no we will have a government employee set wages/value. To date the government employee setting wages/value has not worked out very well. How can it? How can someone or even a group of people make a value judgement on literally billions of hours of work of thousands of different types of work in thousands of different conditions. What makes it even harder is they not only need to make a judgement on the value of the work but also the quantity of the work needed. It is just a mess that can not be solved and of course adds many layors of middle management doing nothing worthwhile but setting values for work they get wrong almost all the time. And if it could be done, lets say instead of people making this judgement the command and control people let a supercomputer constantly set and reset the value of labor guess what would happen the supercomputer would set prices that look a lot like the free market and a lot less like the command and control of communism.

I have some doubts that any money the Tories (I assume we're talking about them as Labour aren't going to spend less on Education, it's woefully underfunded now) cut from Education would go anywhere other than into tax breaks for the Tories.

Why dont you look at actual evidence?
The tories have increased taxes
They can no more buck the market than corbyn
They put up stamp duty, they put in S24, they got rid of W&T, the top rate of IT is higher than under the last labor government, they put in corporate enveloped taxes, they increased dividend taxes and they even were gong to increase self employed taxes etc

What taxes have they cut? The only one that comes to mind is inheritance tax threshold but people mostly avoid IHT anyway. They also cut corporation tax but that has resoluted in more taxes collected directly and likely indirectly

If there were some concrete guarantee that money moved from some degree programmes would be moved to housing or health or anything else that would benefit the country I might reappraise my thoughts.

But the marginal value of degrees right now is so low that almost anything would be better.
For instance they could cut VAT back to 17.5% if they halved university numbers. That would be a boost more to the poor than the rich. The problem is your side cries foul no matter what is done. They cried foul when VAT was increased to 20% and I bet they could cry foul if it was reduced to 17.5%. Everything and anything the tories do is evil that is the narrative. Grow up

As it stands, the more graduates there are, the more Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters there are, and you'll get more of these things anyway.

Yes because real wealth comes into being by voting lefty not by working and creating.... you sound like a 5 year old who only sees and understand that wanting/crying gets them sweets.

Arklight

GreatApe wrote: »

Sadly most people dont understand

Sometimes even I have to revert to trying to think of first principles
The way I imagine things is the UK is a army of 32 million workers.
We allocate a certain number to healthcare, a certain number to transport a certain number to agriculture etc etc etc

We can indeed spend more on healthcare, but fundamentally it means moving part of this workforce from something else to healthcare. The problem with the left is they seem to think we can just spend more without impacting anything else.

With regards to students of our 32 million army of workers about 600,000 of them are allocated to keeping the students feed/watered/housed/educated. If we shrink the number of students in half that frees up 300,000 people who could be put towards heathcare or building homes or well anything really. The question is not are these 600,000 of our workforce in higher education adding any value, sure, the question is would they be adding more value elsewhere and the answer is the marginal allocated worker to education would likely be better allocated elsewhere

Sounds mildly plausible until you remember that the UK has some of the lowest productivity of the G7, and loses more time to sickness and ill health than many bench mark countries.


That's because the Right doesn't really understand what people are.

economic

Arklight wrote: »

Sounds mildly plausible until you remember that the UK has some of the lowest productivity of the G7, and loses more time to sickness and ill health than many bench mark countries.


That's because the Right doesn't really understand what people are.

We lose more time to sickness because we have laws in place to give employees the right to take a certain number of sick days a year - and guess what people will abuse it! i know i did

GreatApe

Also of interest is to look at the constitution of the UK labor workforce

Roughly 80% of UK private sector workers are self employed or work for small companies.
When the lefties cry that business is evil and stealing from the workers the 80% of workers who work for themselves or tiny companies think who the f are you to call me and my work buddies evil and crooks and they vote tory because they can not see/believe the BS that people trying to earn a profit in the free market are evil

This is perhaps the reason the lefties so want to expand the state and take over the larger companies like rail/energy/telecoms etc and expand them too. It is no good having millions of self employed or tiny companies as they wont buy into the idea that they are being exploited

GreatApe

economic wrote: »

We lose more time to sickness because we have laws in place to give employees the right to take a certain number of sick days a year - and guess what people will abuse it! i know i did

Me too
I recall going on holiday to europe for a week on a sicky
My boss even called me when I was in paris saying I hope you get well soon :rotfl:

Needless to say when I was self employed I took no time off and when I ran my small companies I was working all hours of every day 365 days a year

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

Me too
I recall going on holiday to europe for a week on a sicky
My boss even called me when I was in paris saying I hope you get well soon :rotfl:

Needless to say when I was self employed I took no time off and when I ran my small companies I was working all hours of every day 365 days a year

working for large companies gives you a lot of benefits that smaller companies dont offer.

SingleSue

I only ever took a sick day when I was sick and really really unable to drag myself off my sick bed to go in.

I called it not taking the pee.

GreatApe

Arklight wrote: »

Sounds mildly plausible until you remember that the UK has some of the lowest productivity of the G7, and loses more time to sickness and ill health than many bench mark countries.

It is a myth that the UK has low productivity we have one of the highest in the world

For instance if the French are so much more productive why do they have a lower GDP for most of the last 10 years vs the UK?

This is despite the UK actually spending its 2% commitment on defense, actually giving a lot more foreign aid than France, and having a bigger net EU contribution drain than France

That's because the Right doesn't really understand what people are.

Really? What sounds more true to you?

Right: People are fundamentally driven by the need/wants to improve their own and their families conditions

Left: People are fundamentally driven by the need/want to improve the conditions of people they dont know equally as much as people they are related to?

GreatApe

Most importantly Arklight, before you go changing a system stop for a moment and evaluate it on its actual current state especially on the things that are working well. What is actually fundamentally !!!! about the UK?

We are all fed well
We are all housed
We have high wages
We have political freedom (so much so that communists can run for power, in your communist system I wonder if capitalists would be free to void their views?)
We have sexual and religious freedom
We all have access to electricity/water/gas/sanitation/internet
We have access to good healthcare
We have a huge range of goods and services we can choose from
We have quite good safe clean cities
We have stable institutions
We have fair courts and legal system
We honor pensions

A hell of a lot of things are going right

At worst the cup is 95% full and just 5% empty.
You would be an idiot to throw that away without thinking extremely hard about your proposed new system. Can you be sure you are going to get a system that is more than 95% cup full? Don't be so arrogant to think you and your buddies will succeed where hundreds of others like you have failed and killed and impoverished hundreds of millions in the process.