Cambridge is so unequal, compared with other cities, is because it has a much greater share of highly-paid, high-skilled jobs. The question for policymakers is: does everyone in Cambridge have the skills and opportunities to access those jobs?”
The skills to be a professor of nuclear physics at Cambridge are, we tend to think, quite rare.
‘The skills to be a professor of nuclear physics at Cambridge are, we tend to think, quite rare.’
That’s fine. But pay the janitor the same.
‘The question for policymakers is’ . . . who the fvck are you? Mind your own damn business.
‘A report by the Centre for Cities think septic tank last week identified Cambridge as the least equal city in the UK for the second year in a row.’
FIFY
So tell me Donna, how much money do you make, and how can you justify your making more than some other people?
‘Unequal’ is totalist language intended to get you to accept global socialism. Ferguson is, at best, a useful idiot.
Shirley these people are now just trying to wind us up.
They cannot be this stupid. Look, I’ve known stupid people. People with IQs around the 60-mark.
But putting them to one side as little more than toddlers, these Guardian types must be merely trying to court controversy.
I have a tonne of work to do this afternoon, and you bastards provoke my prevaricatory procrastination. Bah!
For years and years; centuries even, we’ve told young people to study hard, learn to do something useful, work hard, and they’ll get ahead in life. And dammit, some people have actually done that and gotten ahead in life and become unequal. We need to stop telling young folks to do this. Sameness should be valued, not getting ahead, and a low level of sameness at that. We’ve been making some progress in countering that in that we’ve dumbed down a lot of education, but not all of it, allowing some to slip through the cracks.
So someone on the average wage in Cambridge is poorer than they would be in London? Because we’re always told that equality is what matters, so in Cambridge they’re (comparatively) worse off?
And they’d all be better off if the university was closed down or moved elsewhere.
Nonsense on stilts.
“The top 6% of earners who live in Cambridge take home 19% of the total income generated by residents”. I am ignorant of these matters: is that really unusually “unequal”?
The article is a muddle. The author wants you to believe that the disparities turn on Town vs Gown but then admits that poor Dr Jones the young lecturer feels poor and can’t afford to buy a house of his own.
So then the author admits that the big deal is “The Cambridge Phenomenon” which yields lots of well paid jobs. So what does the stupid women (if I may quote that nice Mr Corbyn) want? Does she want those firms closed down? Bugger that: I’m rather proud of what my postdocs and research students have contributed to TCP. Good for them.
Some years back, I had an opponent who’d been an Oxford don. Not a mere Oxford grad. Plenty of those. This one had been a don.
Dozy git decided to go into criminal law. Oxford don-ishness was, in his view, a sausage factory of Little worth to students or practitioners.
Cambridge professors are not that well paid. I know of one professor who took a salary cut when he moved from York to Cambridge. The big money is earned by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial academics in the Science Park and the associated satellite firms. Great place to live, despite the traffic and the aggressive cyclists. I have a three-bedroom flat there, which is always let. Sadly, the admirable Tim Newman didn’t take to the city.
So a place which has a university which educates people to a high standard and where such people might stay on after their education because they like the place leads to inequality. What’s the point of universities then. Scrap them all.
Ah, the Guardian. For connoisseurs of fine whines. 2020 set to be an excellent vintage
If everyone in Cambridge had the skills and opportunities to access those jobs this would make those jobs no longer so desirable to have.
Because the increase in number of qualified people competing for those jobs would drive compensation down.
And then, ironically, the most desirable job would be ‘cleaning lady’
“The question for policymakers is: does everyone in Cambridge have the skills and opportunities to access those [highly-paid, high-skilled jobs] jobs?”
Answer is: skills No; opportunities Yes, apply but prob rejected
What is solution? Throw taxpayers money at more outreach/diversity/inclusion useless non-jobs? Deport all the thickos to Sheppey? Ignore and let market/nature prevail?
I guess Groan says “Throw taxpayers money…”
@TD, RichardT
Spot on
Only in this country …
Very brainy people do very brainy things that provide huge benefits for society and are well paid. Other people seeing said brainy people doing very brainy things and making lots of money move to area to provide services to very brainy people, but for some inexplicable reason don’t get paid same as said very brainy people.
This, apparently, is tantamount to starting the French Revolution and therefore very brainy people must be stripped of their rewards for being very brainy and working hard.
Lots of high skill high pay jobs require specific experience and skillset – if you don’t have the right ones then you won’t get the job.
Can be too skilled – someone who is project manager for a couple of recent power station building projects applying for a job as a brickie probably won’t get it either. 🙂
@ BiND
A lot of the envy is due to the false assumption that the very brainy don’t have to work hard. The Grauniad writers see some of their contemporaries cruise through school coming top and fail to realise that their later success requires hard work.
“Cambridge professors are not that well paid.” You can pretty much sort the duffers from the high-flyers when it comes to profs or lecturers (in any half-way decent Uni) by seeing how many multiples of their university salary they’ve managed to wangle in side gigs. At Imperial there was one semi-retired guy who taught introductory thermodynamics who’d invented an X-ray mirror (not really a mirror but it could steer X-rays around, say, a telescope) and he was absolutely minted. Another couple of guys built a sub-nanosecond exposure camera which the US DoE thought would be nifty for recording bomb tests. Ka-ching. Then there were the consultancy jobs, which could be nice little earners. And if you were genuinely well-regarded in your field then getting on the books of a top-end firm of briefs as an expert witness was an amazing wheeze. A thousand quid a day and this was twenty years ago.
John77 “the false assumption that the very brainy don’t have to work hard”
Which would be understandable albeit mistaken in the days when work for most meant manual labour, but now when most work (in the experience of journalists) is sitting chatting in a nice office with coffee… well, must be ‘inequality’