The think tank found that if UK households had the average income and inequality levels of Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands, then typical household incomes would be a third higher – equivalent to £8,800 per family. For the poorest fifth of households, their incomes would be 40pc larger.
Therefore economic growth is important, We should tich what limits it – all for the sake of the children.
So, that’s everything to do with diversity overboard, the disasters of planning climate change, halve, at least, tertiary education – so what next?
The way we’re screwing our energy supply Tim, you’ll soon be way, way ahead!!!!
The Diversity and Climate idiocy.. check.
Not too sure about slashing tertiary education.
While there is a lot of Basketweaving in the UK system, there’s the bit where entirely scrapping Telephone Sanitising may have unforeseen consequences in the future.
I think it’s more efficient to incentivise choice of subject through selectively subsidising the tertiary education that’s actually useful when it comes to “productivity”, both through student loans and ruthlessly enforcing a minimum measure of quality and efficiency on the institutions themselves.
Not a complete picture, and there’s some if’s and but’s there as well, but you want the general effect to be that tertiay education becomes challenging enough, with enough opportunity for anyome with the aptitude to finance a study relatively hurdle-free if it’s in the “productive” fields while the potential Basketweaver PhD’s will mostly have to fend for themselves.
Of course, ridding the curriculum in the primary and secondary education of Diversity and Climate Woo will give room for instilling a sense of “I have to earn an actual living later” in the youngsters, so that may help as well..
But with the current crop of “teachers” …. Good luck with that…
The Diversity and Climate idiocy.
Said this many times before. Recognising & then debating is the why. The idiocy was doing so. Self harming.
I think it’s more efficient to incentivise choice of subject through selectively subsidising the tertiary education that’s actually useful when it comes to “productivity”
But who decides “what’s useful”? Good god, not the government surely?
What’s wrong with the 1940s/1950/1960s system my grandparents and father benefited from, future employers fund you. They’re the ones at the sharp end of knowing what’s in short supply, they’re the ones who painfully suffer the negative effects of not rectifying that supply problem.
“What’s wrong with the 1940s/1950/1960s system my grandparents and father benefited from, future employers fund you. They’re the ones at the sharp end of knowing what’s in short supply, they’re the ones who painfully suffer the negative effects of not rectifying that supply problem.”
Thats all very well in a world where you work in one factory all your life. Start as apprentice, leave as foreman or shop floor manager. It pays the company to train you then, they’ll get a life time of work out of you. Nowadays if you train people up they just f*ck off and work for someone else who pays a few quid more in wages. I know a guy who runs a tree surgery business, he gets new staff in, spends a lot of time and money training them, then they just disappear to work for his competitors, presumably who don’t bother training anyone, and just pay a bit higher wages. There’s no loyalty shown by the employees, so why should the employer bother spending his money on training?
Jim,
The flipside of your argument, is “now I’ve trained you, what do I do with you?”
For instance, if the Company says “systems engineering is one of our most important skills and something we urgently need”, and both they and an employee invest a lot of time and money in learning it (both on-the-job and getting a MSc from UCL in it)… the Company saying “well done you, enjoy your new skills and qualification. What were you expecting, a promotion? A pay rise? Get back to work!” and the considerable effort can be clearly seen to have brought no reward or benefit, may not be entirely retention-positive.
A belated promotion board, advancing said employee to Principal Engineer, didn’t exactly help when it transpired that the benefits previously associated with rising to PE4 had been made “discretionary” (meaning, closed to new arrivals) and even the pay rise usually linked to a higher grade was “deferred”. So, more work and responsibility (as befits the higher grade) with any benefits from it to appear… later. In the fullness of time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s an opportunity.
At which point, said employee might decide to take advantage of the labour market to find a role that did place tangible value on their experience and qualifications, however grateful for the MSc and the very great opportunities it unlocked, they might remain.
My – I mean, their – first choice would have been to stay, but discovering that I was expected to train up a new starter appointed on a higher salary for rather lower skills than mine, was a straw on the camel’s back too far; I subsequently, speaking to a former colleague on neutral ground and friendly terms, had a conversation that indicated a degree of assumed “he’s loyal, he’ll stay, we don’t need to pay him more” and some management surprise when I did hand in my notice.
Saying “employees aren’t loyal” is often an excuse for “we’re paying badly and treating them poorly, why won’t the treacherous proles just put up with it?”
@Jim… I suppose that was a problem that was countered in “the good old days” by indentured apprenticeships – you contracted to work for your employer for a certain number of years after your training, or had to buy your way out. Can’t do that now, it encroaches on their yuman rites. ISTR that a while back one of the big computer consultancies (EDS?) got a load of bad press for having employment contracts that included a “pay for your past training if you leave too soon” clause.
@jgh the “what’s useful and who gets to decide” is one of the if’s and but’s..
Never said there was an Easy Answer to this one, especially given that the Wokesters have already entrenched themselves in the system..
And even with the harshest and most decisive of measures it’ll take about a decade for things to trickle through and show actual results.. First got to train the teachers to replace the Wokesters, then that generation of students will have to work their way through the system..
Stuff like this gets realised in decades, not years.
So the Think tank found that if we were as rich as people in richer countries we’d be richer.
What genius insight! The funders must be well pleased.
The other “finding” is more debateable. (I’m not going to actually read the paper, I’m not that bored.) Looking at income differentials and average incomes doesn’t seem to produce much correlation to me.
Relatively equal income distribution: Poland, Canada, Egypt, Israel, Uruguay, etc
Relatively unequal income distribution: USA, Mexico, China, Russia, Iran, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela…
You train someone up and then they shaft you by leaving for more sterlings.
Make sure you hire their wife on childcare friendly part-time hours.
@Baron Jackfield: such contracts are still fairly common, at least for fear schemes. In accountancy especially.
@Grikath: never worry about what’s useful or who gets to decide, just align the incentives.
Move the universities to be funded by their students’ loan repayments. If their education is rubbish it’s now their problem. You’ll be amazed how quickly they drop useless courses when their salaries are at stake.
*graduate schemes, not fear schemes. Stupid phone.
A pal of mine had a remunerative scholarship from an industrial company. He loyally accepted a job offer from them when he graduated. Later they wrote to say sorry, but we’re going pay you less than we promised. He replied that oh no they weren’t and went off to find himself a new job. It took him all of a day.
Dear God firms were often badly run in those days. As my father used to say, people running large businesses aren’t really businessmen. They’d flounder trying to run a small business in the competitive part of the economy. No wonder Mr Buffet likes his businesses to have “moats”.
So that’s where the phrase “over a barrel” comes from!
Grikath …”Stuff like this gets realised in decades, not years.”
Until it gets so bad everything falls apart, then recovery may take a century and more.
I think it was Branson who said train your staff well enough that they can leave, but treat them well enough so they don’t
I’m still waiting to find an example of this in real life
The way the data is reported is rather confusing – it implies that the average income levels of households in all the countries mentioned are equal to each other, and all equally higher than those in the UK, when they are not (there is certainly little chance that household incomes in France are nearly $9000 per annum higher than those in Blighty, even after social transfers are taken into account). I presume the Telegraph journo is referring to some kind of aggregate figure?
Then there is the question of how accurate the data sets are. I’m guessing that the Resolution Foundation has only measured gross incomes, but they are of limited value when evaluating living standards. Instead, if one looks at the OECD’s data for *net* incomes using PPP exchange rates, for example, the UK is placed higher than all of the countries cited bar the Netherlands, both for single person households and for married couples with children (earning 100% of the average wage). See here:
https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=55145
Indeed, do the figures take into account purchasing power indices at all? Eurostat figures used to show that, with the exception of heavily-taxed commodities such as booze and cigs, most “lifestyle items” (including, most importantly, food) were cheaper in the UK than in most comparator nations. I suppose I should just answer my own questions by shifting my arse and reading the report in full, but I wondered if anybody here had a proper understanding of it already.
Sorry, that should be “The way the data *are* reported…” in the first sentence. Whoops.