The great literature of the 20th century is full of disenchantment with the human condition. From Kafka to Koestler, from Camus to Canetti, from Heller to Houllebeq, its heroes - no, its everymen - rail and chafe against the impersonality and alienation of modern life.
But though I scanned their pages full of sympathy and fellow-feeling, usually from within the seams of a charity shop overcoat, nothing has ever filled me with greater boredom and horror than the experience of ordering a new dishwasher cutlery basket from E-spares.
I've nothing against E-spares, a domestic part replacement website which seems to do a terrific job. But oh Jesus. There is a video ("Hi. I'm Matt from E-spares") with bouncy theme music. In it the chap tells you to order the one that's exactly right for your dishwasher if you can, before considering the universal dishwasher basket. I watched all 42 bland seconds of it with my mouth wide open.
That was bad enough. But what's this? When I go to the universal dishwasher basket page I see that a staggering 672 people have written and posted comments about it. Why? On the first page one reads "better then the one i had and better for big familys". I am tempted to scream, to read them all and jump out of the window in equal measure.
Never in all my life have I felt the sheer pointlessness of human existence so keenly. That it should come to this. "Measuring out my life in coffee spoons"? Eliot didn't know the half of it.
Thursday 13 June 2013
Wednesday 12 June 2013
So farewell then GCSE coursework
As I have often said here, the plural of anecdote is not data. But (as I have often gone on to say) -
A few years ago a friend's daughter came round to my house to do some coursework on my computer. She was doing the composition module of her GCSE music. At some point in the day she played it to me. "It's bloody awful", she said. Privately agreeing, but searching for something good to say about it, I said, "I quite like the middle section". "Oh, Mr Beech wrote that bit", she replied. Mr Beech was the head of department.
A relative of mine was doing GCSE art. She had got stuck with a big painting and brought it home. Her Mum is quite a good artist and spent an hour or so working on it. The daughter got an A, and for a year or so the painting figured prominently on the school's promotional literature.
A teenager was telling me recently about her French GCSE aural. Apparently the kids have to write and then memorise the answers to some questions (actually where the parents are literate in French, the parents tend to do it for them). In the aural itself the examiner, who is their teacher, asks the questions and marks the kids on their ability to recite the answers. The exchange is recorded on tape, but, this teenager told me, that doesn't stop the teachers giving visual clues when candidates have a memory lapse, or even writing words down on paper and holding them up for the candidates to see.
I have a lot of sympathy for teachers faced with yet another shake-up of the exam system. But coursework has got to go. There is overwhelming temptation for parents and staff to cheat.
A few years ago a friend's daughter came round to my house to do some coursework on my computer. She was doing the composition module of her GCSE music. At some point in the day she played it to me. "It's bloody awful", she said. Privately agreeing, but searching for something good to say about it, I said, "I quite like the middle section". "Oh, Mr Beech wrote that bit", she replied. Mr Beech was the head of department.
A relative of mine was doing GCSE art. She had got stuck with a big painting and brought it home. Her Mum is quite a good artist and spent an hour or so working on it. The daughter got an A, and for a year or so the painting figured prominently on the school's promotional literature.
A teenager was telling me recently about her French GCSE aural. Apparently the kids have to write and then memorise the answers to some questions (actually where the parents are literate in French, the parents tend to do it for them). In the aural itself the examiner, who is their teacher, asks the questions and marks the kids on their ability to recite the answers. The exchange is recorded on tape, but, this teenager told me, that doesn't stop the teachers giving visual clues when candidates have a memory lapse, or even writing words down on paper and holding them up for the candidates to see.
I have a lot of sympathy for teachers faced with yet another shake-up of the exam system. But coursework has got to go. There is overwhelming temptation for parents and staff to cheat.
Tuesday 11 June 2013
Obama is watching you, apparently
I am greeting the news that Obama is watching me with a shrug.
No doubt what the US is doing is terribly wrong and infringes our right to privacy. No doubt in the hands of an even less benevolent state than the US the information might be put to bad use.
Nevertheless I don't think Edward Snowden has told us anything very earth shattering.
The obvious reason is that I don't have anything to hide (although in the world of the security services that's probably a matter of opinion; and mine may not count).
Secondly, it's one thing for the CIA to be monitoring and storing my emails (and my posts on this blog), but I don't flatter myself that anyone is actually reading them (if you are, greetings all, and long live the special relationship).
Thirdly, did we seriously expect that we could have devices in our homes receiving and sending information all the time and that no-one would watch what we were doing? We might just as well be surprised that Tesco Value Burgers should contain horsemeat.
I have long resigned myself to the idea that Orwell's Telescreen in every home, watching citizens as they watched it, has come to us a mere ten years after 1984 (actually the Telescreen is even more ubiquitous than Orwell imagined, since in his novel the proles are considered too unimportant to have them). If English Country Cottages can get adverts to scroll down the sidebar of my browser, did anyone really imagine that the Government couldn't get into our PCs as well?
When you go online, you lay yourself open to the world.
No doubt what the US is doing is terribly wrong and infringes our right to privacy. No doubt in the hands of an even less benevolent state than the US the information might be put to bad use.
Nevertheless I don't think Edward Snowden has told us anything very earth shattering.
The obvious reason is that I don't have anything to hide (although in the world of the security services that's probably a matter of opinion; and mine may not count).
Secondly, it's one thing for the CIA to be monitoring and storing my emails (and my posts on this blog), but I don't flatter myself that anyone is actually reading them (if you are, greetings all, and long live the special relationship).
Thirdly, did we seriously expect that we could have devices in our homes receiving and sending information all the time and that no-one would watch what we were doing? We might just as well be surprised that Tesco Value Burgers should contain horsemeat.
I have long resigned myself to the idea that Orwell's Telescreen in every home, watching citizens as they watched it, has come to us a mere ten years after 1984 (actually the Telescreen is even more ubiquitous than Orwell imagined, since in his novel the proles are considered too unimportant to have them). If English Country Cottages can get adverts to scroll down the sidebar of my browser, did anyone really imagine that the Government couldn't get into our PCs as well?
When you go online, you lay yourself open to the world.
Sarah Tisdall - The Guardian's missing whistleblower
In the wake of the furore about President Obama's data gathering exercise, the Guardian prints this morning a piece in G2 consisting of interviews with whistleblowers from various fields, detailing their tribulations - loss of job, loss of home, loss of health, relationships etc. As I read this piece I couldn't help noticing that one of the most famous whistleblowers of recent years was missing.
This was Sarah Tisdall, a civil servant who in 1983 leaked details about the arrival of US cruise missiles in Britain to a newspaper. The paper complied with a court order that it reveal the identity of its source, and Tisdall as a result was sent to prison for four months.
The newspaper in question? The Guardian of course.
This was Sarah Tisdall, a civil servant who in 1983 leaked details about the arrival of US cruise missiles in Britain to a newspaper. The paper complied with a court order that it reveal the identity of its source, and Tisdall as a result was sent to prison for four months.
The newspaper in question? The Guardian of course.
The end of the Eurozone. Or not.
Today in the German Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe a case begins which could signal the end of the Eurozone. Or not.
The head of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, is asking the Court for a declaration that the European Central Bank exceeded its mandate when it said last year that it would be prepared to buy up the sovereign debt of troubled southern peripheral member countries. ECB head Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction mechanism is widely credited with putting a cap on bond yields in Spain and Italy, thereby preventing default and Eurozone break up.
Now the Court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, but it does over the Bundesbank, and it could in theory declare that Germany's central bank could not lawfully take part in Draghi's scheme. OTR has cast such a formidable spell on the bond markets that no country has yet had to use it, and what would happen to bond yields if the Court ruled OTR unconstitutional is anyone's guess.
But while we're in the business of guessing, my money is on the Court finding in favour of the ECB.
Why?
Because the great and the good in continental Europe have been brought up on Every Closer Union with their mother's milk. If I had to bet the mortgage, I'd wager that the eight judges of the Bundesverfassungsgericht won't upset the apple cart.
The head of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, is asking the Court for a declaration that the European Central Bank exceeded its mandate when it said last year that it would be prepared to buy up the sovereign debt of troubled southern peripheral member countries. ECB head Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction mechanism is widely credited with putting a cap on bond yields in Spain and Italy, thereby preventing default and Eurozone break up.
Now the Court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, but it does over the Bundesbank, and it could in theory declare that Germany's central bank could not lawfully take part in Draghi's scheme. OTR has cast such a formidable spell on the bond markets that no country has yet had to use it, and what would happen to bond yields if the Court ruled OTR unconstitutional is anyone's guess.
But while we're in the business of guessing, my money is on the Court finding in favour of the ECB.
Why?
Because the great and the good in continental Europe have been brought up on Every Closer Union with their mother's milk. If I had to bet the mortgage, I'd wager that the eight judges of the Bundesverfassungsgericht won't upset the apple cart.
Tuesday 4 June 2013
Ed Balls smells the coffee
I've been pointing out for five years that the credit crunch is a much more serious problem for the Left than the Right, and there are a couple of signs today that late risers are at last beginning to smell the coffee.
Firstly, the Grauniad reports today Ed Balls's speech to the effect that under the next Labour government the most affluent pensioners won't get the winter fuel payments any more. This reform is long overdue, and it shows a dawning acknowledgment that future governments really are going to have to cut spending.
Secondly, the paper has a wonderful quote from the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Left-leaning think-tank, whose director Nick Pearce writes, "The challenge for Labour is to assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs".
It's been obvious since about 2009 that the boom in UK government spending had been largely built on the state taking on more debt, and on the tax revenues generated by consumer debt. All the credit crunch did was demonstrate the truth of the maxim that What Can't Go On Forever Must Stop.
The consequences for social democracy, as the IPPR seem at last to be recognising, are devastating. Social democracy's big idea is that the state will spend the large sums of money required to support people who need supporting. What's immediately obvious from the 1997/2010 record however is that the UK government could not afford its public spending commitments even though its course almost exactly coincided with the longest period of economic growth in British history (1993-2008).
If public spending was unaffordable during the very best of economic good times, my reasoning goes, it isn't going to be affordable in the more straitened times to come. That's why I've been boring friends and family for years with the proposition that social democracy as we have known and sometimes loved it is in very deep trouble.
So when an IPPR director says Labour must "assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs" it is a cherishable "no really" moment for those of us in the reality-based community.
You have to hand it to Ed Balls. No one else in British politics could possibly utter his line about "iron financial discipline" - this from Gordon Brown's chief lieutenant - and maintain a straight face.
His winter fuel payment cut will save about £100 million, it is calculated. The UK's projected deficit for 2013-14 is close to £120 billion.
Deckchairs. Titanic.
Firstly, the Grauniad reports today Ed Balls's speech to the effect that under the next Labour government the most affluent pensioners won't get the winter fuel payments any more. This reform is long overdue, and it shows a dawning acknowledgment that future governments really are going to have to cut spending.
Secondly, the paper has a wonderful quote from the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Left-leaning think-tank, whose director Nick Pearce writes, "The challenge for Labour is to assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs".
It's been obvious since about 2009 that the boom in UK government spending had been largely built on the state taking on more debt, and on the tax revenues generated by consumer debt. All the credit crunch did was demonstrate the truth of the maxim that What Can't Go On Forever Must Stop.
The consequences for social democracy, as the IPPR seem at last to be recognising, are devastating. Social democracy's big idea is that the state will spend the large sums of money required to support people who need supporting. What's immediately obvious from the 1997/2010 record however is that the UK government could not afford its public spending commitments even though its course almost exactly coincided with the longest period of economic growth in British history (1993-2008).
If public spending was unaffordable during the very best of economic good times, my reasoning goes, it isn't going to be affordable in the more straitened times to come. That's why I've been boring friends and family for years with the proposition that social democracy as we have known and sometimes loved it is in very deep trouble.
So when an IPPR director says Labour must "assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs" it is a cherishable "no really" moment for those of us in the reality-based community.
You have to hand it to Ed Balls. No one else in British politics could possibly utter his line about "iron financial discipline" - this from Gordon Brown's chief lieutenant - and maintain a straight face.
His winter fuel payment cut will save about £100 million, it is calculated. The UK's projected deficit for 2013-14 is close to £120 billion.
Deckchairs. Titanic.
Monday 3 June 2013
The Sutton Trust - don't make me laugh
The Sutton Trust, an educational charity, has come up with a corking demonstration of the woeful blindness that blights UK educational policy.
It reports today that top state schools "are significantly more socially selective than the average state school nationally and other schools in their own localities", with a much lower proportion of kids on free school meals. Affluent middle class people are crowding round the best schools. The Trust thinks that "schools, particularly in urban areas, should use a system of ballots - where a proportion of places is allocated randomly - or banding across the range of abilities to achieve a genuinely balanced intake".
But the Trust is mistaking correlation for causation. It hasn't asked two fundamental questions, the first being "what is a good school?", the second "how does a school become good?"
The Trust defines good schools by results, referring to them as "the highest performing comprehensive schools". Good results = good schools. Let's assume that's right (although I personally think "good" is better defined in terms of value added). Now how did those schools become good? Obviously a lot of different things go into the mix - quality of leadership, quality of teaching, quality of facilities; but surely the one which trumps them all is quality of intake (I know the plural of anecdote does not equal data, but my own kids have done very well in a comprehensive in which some of the teaching was terrible and the buildings so depressing and squalid that they would have been a disgrace in 1970s Albania). If a school has an intake in which bright industrious kids well supported at home are over-represented, it will tend to do better than one in which they're under-represented.
So in which section of society are bright industrious kids well supported at home most likely to come from? Why, the middle class of course.
Keep with me here - I'm not suggesting that all working class kids are thick and have feckless parents, or that all middle class kids are all paragons; I'm just suggesting that bright industrious people tend to marry people like themselves, and either become or remain middle class. Not surprisingly, given a triple whammy of genetics, culture and affluence, they tend to raise children who take on their parents' characteristics.
It may not be an especially appealing thought, but we should not be surprised to find that the bright and industrious are over-represented in the middle class compared to the working class. This can only be not true if a) intelligence and industry are not heritable qualities, or b) we live in society that does not reward brains and effort. They are; we do.
So actually the Sutton Trust has got it risibly the wrong way round. There is a link between the middle class and the best performing state schools, but it doesn't work the way the Trust imagines.
The Trust thinks the middle class cluster round the best schools. Actually the best schools are best because the middle class cluster round them.
We will never get educational policy right in Britain while we suffer from this delusion - and Michael Gove suffers from it as well - that all wrongs can be righted if only we can make all schools "good" schools. The Sutton Trusts goals are actually more limited, in the sense that it is only trying to equalise access to "good" schools. But it too is chasing a shadow. If you equalise access the only result will be that "good" schools will start to get slightly worse results and "bad" schools slightly better.
The Trust says, comically, that "lower income students do better when there is a mix of students of all backgrounds in a school". I'm sure they do. The corollary must also be true - that higher income students do worse; and moreover as you reduce the number of higher income students in a school, the lower income students, previously doing better because of them, start to do worse as well. The Sutton Trust are strangely silent about this.
No amount of tinkering will fix the basic problem, which is that a lot of kids aren't very bright, and in any event come from households with a range of dreadful social problems, not the least of which is that the parents didn't get anything in particular out of the education system themselves. The kids are fly enough to know that they aren't going to be lawyers or doctors, but not quite clever enough to be realise that education is not just about money.
What might just make a difference, because of the very large numbers of children involved, would be the abolition of private education. A tsunami of Tarquins and Tamsins would descend reluctantly on the Gasworks Comp. Then you would see some equalisation.
But which government is going to risk that one?
P.S. A very good letter in the Graun the following day from a fellow sceptic wondered whether affluent middle class people enjoy better health because they are treated by "top doctors", or whether leafy suburbs enjoy lower crime rates because they are watched over by "top police officers".
Very pithily nailed. Bah. Humbug.
It reports today that top state schools "are significantly more socially selective than the average state school nationally and other schools in their own localities", with a much lower proportion of kids on free school meals. Affluent middle class people are crowding round the best schools. The Trust thinks that "schools, particularly in urban areas, should use a system of ballots - where a proportion of places is allocated randomly - or banding across the range of abilities to achieve a genuinely balanced intake".
But the Trust is mistaking correlation for causation. It hasn't asked two fundamental questions, the first being "what is a good school?", the second "how does a school become good?"
The Trust defines good schools by results, referring to them as "the highest performing comprehensive schools". Good results = good schools. Let's assume that's right (although I personally think "good" is better defined in terms of value added). Now how did those schools become good? Obviously a lot of different things go into the mix - quality of leadership, quality of teaching, quality of facilities; but surely the one which trumps them all is quality of intake (I know the plural of anecdote does not equal data, but my own kids have done very well in a comprehensive in which some of the teaching was terrible and the buildings so depressing and squalid that they would have been a disgrace in 1970s Albania). If a school has an intake in which bright industrious kids well supported at home are over-represented, it will tend to do better than one in which they're under-represented.
So in which section of society are bright industrious kids well supported at home most likely to come from? Why, the middle class of course.
Keep with me here - I'm not suggesting that all working class kids are thick and have feckless parents, or that all middle class kids are all paragons; I'm just suggesting that bright industrious people tend to marry people like themselves, and either become or remain middle class. Not surprisingly, given a triple whammy of genetics, culture and affluence, they tend to raise children who take on their parents' characteristics.
It may not be an especially appealing thought, but we should not be surprised to find that the bright and industrious are over-represented in the middle class compared to the working class. This can only be not true if a) intelligence and industry are not heritable qualities, or b) we live in society that does not reward brains and effort. They are; we do.
So actually the Sutton Trust has got it risibly the wrong way round. There is a link between the middle class and the best performing state schools, but it doesn't work the way the Trust imagines.
The Trust thinks the middle class cluster round the best schools. Actually the best schools are best because the middle class cluster round them.
We will never get educational policy right in Britain while we suffer from this delusion - and Michael Gove suffers from it as well - that all wrongs can be righted if only we can make all schools "good" schools. The Sutton Trusts goals are actually more limited, in the sense that it is only trying to equalise access to "good" schools. But it too is chasing a shadow. If you equalise access the only result will be that "good" schools will start to get slightly worse results and "bad" schools slightly better.
The Trust says, comically, that "lower income students do better when there is a mix of students of all backgrounds in a school". I'm sure they do. The corollary must also be true - that higher income students do worse; and moreover as you reduce the number of higher income students in a school, the lower income students, previously doing better because of them, start to do worse as well. The Sutton Trust are strangely silent about this.
No amount of tinkering will fix the basic problem, which is that a lot of kids aren't very bright, and in any event come from households with a range of dreadful social problems, not the least of which is that the parents didn't get anything in particular out of the education system themselves. The kids are fly enough to know that they aren't going to be lawyers or doctors, but not quite clever enough to be realise that education is not just about money.
What might just make a difference, because of the very large numbers of children involved, would be the abolition of private education. A tsunami of Tarquins and Tamsins would descend reluctantly on the Gasworks Comp. Then you would see some equalisation.
But which government is going to risk that one?
P.S. A very good letter in the Graun the following day from a fellow sceptic wondered whether affluent middle class people enjoy better health because they are treated by "top doctors", or whether leafy suburbs enjoy lower crime rates because they are watched over by "top police officers".
Very pithily nailed. Bah. Humbug.
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