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Universities and small business aren't working as intended
A number of things seem not to be working in Britain today but these two separate articles on the effectiveness of entirely different areas government spending (universities, The Economist (£) and small-business, The Guardian) both point to the same policy remedy of allowing research and development to be incentivised by simplifying the accounting in mid to large national-based companies (but why not all?).
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Ukraine commentary from November
Two interesting points from newsletters on Ukraine last week.
The first is regarding security guarantees in Europe from Phillips O’Brien’s The Two Futures
What this war has shown is that there are two realities for a European state: being a full NATO member covered by article 5—and everything else.
Russia’s aggression has consolidated NATO but leaves those outside the alliance exposed and with no real choice but to seek inclusion at some point in the future. The article also comments how Russia goes out of its way to avoid provoking an alliance reaction that will crush its remaining conventional force.
The other was about the strange double-standards on Russia’s ineffective offensives from Lawrence Freeman in Why “not losing” is not tantamount to winning.
Whatever limited progress has been made has come at an enormous cost. Zaluzhny claimed on 10 November that Russia had suffered some 10,000 casualties since 10 October, and had lost over 100 tanks, 250 other armored vehicles, about 50 artillery systems and seven Su-25 aircraft.
Even allowing for some exaggeration these are staggering losses, which if experienced by Ukraine would have led to gloomy questions about their ability to stay in the fight, and the wastefulness of their tactics. Somehow it is now assumed that in an unaccountable system, with soldiers taken from minorities and the poor, these casualties barely register in Russian society and cause no political backlash.
I’ve been wondering why when Ukraine suffers losses “realists” start talking about some fantasy of a land deal that will be acceptable to Russia but when Russia loses material that makes it difficult to continue to project any power globally there are not demands for Russia to start to specify attainable war aims.
There is something unpleasant in the idea that all these lives lost in fruitless offensives are meaningless and of no consequence to their own people. The article talks about the signs of change in the Russian attitude to the war and I can’t believe that a country can continue to lose at this rate and it has no impact.
Clearly democracies with citizen soldiers need to think about casualties differently to systems that are inherently coercing compliance. Ukraine needs to think about how to conserve itself as a nation. However it has been a long time since we’ve seen an imperial power manage to maintain control of an unwilling population. For the defenders not losing looks a lot more like victory than the occupiers.
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It’s frustrating that the current UK government will do anything in its power to avoid putting up Universal Credit to the point that it is now costing more to inefficiently deliver support to the wrong people than to just swallow an ideological objection and do the obvious thing.
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Brexit and economic migration
An interesting article about some of the rhetoric around UK shortages. The quote that stands out for me: “I don’t accept that the UK’s reliance on unskilled, cheap labour is an unalloyed good”.
Brexit hasn’t provoked the basic discussions about the nature of the country’s economy in the way it should have.
The rhetoric around training and paying better has truth to it but there are a number of jobs that simply don’t require a lot training and really the question is about whether the true costs of labour can be passed back into the wider economy. Part of the Brexit dream was forcing the capital investment into automation required to remove the need for labour but its going to take longer than six months to come up with caravans of self-driving lorries.
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I get angry about the amount of effort that goes into holding Nicole Sturgeon to account for Alex Salmond’s actions.
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Bring back modular examinations
The recent exam marking fiasco(s) has shown what the problems might be with a system that relies entirely on a one-shot exam at the end of an education process. BTECs were originally considered not in need of regrading because they were modular and therefore already had a lot of evidence of what the candidate might be expected to score in their final result (they were later revised to be inline with the revision of other examinations but still).
Modular examinations used to be the way we assessed people until it was abolished by Michael Gove in favour of final examinations. Literally this government has gone on so long that it’s reaping the consequences of its actions and it does not care to change direction.
Assessment by a single examination favours certain kinds of people, if I was being unkind I would say it favours the approach of the currently ruling clique and their aversion to consistent work in favour of a roll of the dice and a bit of elan to bluff your way through. Having to turn up and do the work repeatedly not only has the advantage of being a better indicator of educational performance over time but hey also means that you don’t have to create ficitious grading systems at the last minute with the aid of an algorithim.
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