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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » David Herdson on Tactical voting: “the voters’ blind man’s bluff”
Once upon a time it was easy. There were only three parties, you had a rough idea of how the local land lay and if your preferred party stood no chance while your second preference did, then you could lend them your vote in the hope of keeping out the worst option. Oh for such simple times.
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It might be better rather than sponsoring degrees to look at ways to wipe clean student loans for people entering and showing commitment to various socially or economically useful professions. The are for example hundreds of people who take a generic BA Psychology Degree (because its easy to get into having done the standard English/History/Geography A level combination) and then join the HR/Marketing/Sales department of a large corporation. The former would on the face of it look like an obvious medical type degree to encourage, but we really don't need more corporate drones, and we certainly shouldn't be subsidising them.
It might be better to look at some tie up with the professional institutions, so when you achieve full membership of the GMC, or RNC, or IEEE/IMECHE/ICHEME or whatever we are encouraging this year you get some or all of your loan refunded.
We both agree that there are certain subjects which principally benefit society at large (say medicine) and that there subjects which principally benefit the individual (say business studies), and there are subjects of dubious societal and personal benefits (say media studies).
It makes sense for the state to pay for more of the tuition fees when society benefits, and less when it is the individual that benefits.
Finally: the point about income tax is a fair one, but ignores the fact that (1) certain degrees are not correlated with higher lifetime earnings, and (2) your logic seems slightly unfair to people who earn the money without having extracted the benefits of education from the state.
The Greek government (basically) caved on everything. It's accepting supervision. It's accepting that it needs to continue the reforms in the original agreement. It's accepting the previous primary budget surplus for 2015. And it's accepting that it won't roll-back or do anything without clearing it with the troika.
Only in AEP world is this a case that Greece "effectively scraps the draconian fiscal targets".
You believe that tinkering around the edges will allow you to identify "societally beneficial" course choices and "individually beneficial" course choices.
I disagree with this fundamentally. Firstly the individual at 17yo does not necessarily have all the information needed to make the best decision for their own best personal outcome. But more importantly, we don't actually know which outcome will happen based on the course chosen.
While it seems a Slam Dunk that medicine is societally beneficially, do you then impose slavery on the graduate to prevent them leaving the country to work aboard? What if that work abroad is with Medecins Sans Frontiers rather than a US Hospital?
The problem is that in all examples I can ever think of, trying to address market failure with market manipulation does not achieve the goals which were originally intended. It does not have a good record and in all examples I have ever seen, the imposition of markets on education has its largest impact on making education VERY expensive.
It seems fairer that as part of the Social Contract, free education at all levels is logically coherent and beneficial to society without risking personal consequences for bad choices which are often outside the individual's control.
I agree with you that there is potentially an issue with people going abroad - but let's simply not worry about it. The numbers will be trivial.
Basically, your argument seems to boil down to: charging for some but not others is hard, so we shouldn't do it.
Let's see if - together - we can work out some broad rules of thumb. Are there areas where British companies are moving skilled work abroad due to a lack of qualified British employees? Are there areas where we need to import labour because of a lack of domestically qualifies people?
If those aren't good questions - what are the good questions?
In the olden days both questions would get roughly the same answer - today the polls are very bad at predicting the vote share at the next election (the election is not going to be tomorrow). . UKIP and green votes are going to be well down on their current poll ratings. I predict UKIP 5-6% and green 1-2%.
The problem is that the list of "good questions" is probably endless. It is certainly large enough to be considerable beyond "hard" to do. Personally, I don't have much faith in Planning as being capable of delivering reliable outcomes, it is the core for the failure of the Socialist model.
The beauty of free education is that it allows failure without consequence. That may be a bad thing in industry or business but in education having people with too many qualifications is not always a bad thing. Even Carlotta (unknowingly) supported this with her defence of English Lit as a course choice.
As the education is free, once you get on in your career if your degree isn't benefiting you, there is the option of returning to study without another £50k of debt, further improving the skills base of the country as a whole and you no longer penalise people for making the wrong choice - often through no fault of their own.
Until Polls find a way of estimating and showing non voters they are going to be pretty meaningless.
The old deal was always if they succeeded in life from their studies they paid high rate tax which seemed fair enough.
(I'm a philosophy graduate, and didn't pay for my degree, and am very grateful.)
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that we have a mismatch between the skills needed by businesses and the NHS and the like, and what our universities produce. The evidence for this can be seen in the combination of high unemployment levels for British people, and high levels of immigration.
You're not addressing that point. You're making points about "availability of information" for 17 year olds, and suggesting there is no way to measure demand for skills, and therefore abrogating any suggestion that the state should do more than offer more Media Studies degrees.
You seem to be hung up on 'knowledge' - which quickly outdates - and oblivious to 'skills' - which can last a lifetime.
My argument is about funding and I reject the idea that you can use Planning to make the funding settlement fair by manipulating a market based on tuition fees. Both the individual and the Planners will make errors and the consequences of those are punitive. Only by removing the fees do you remove the consequences of this failure.
Once you get past that, yes, there has to be some acceptance of how places are funded at a national level which will require Planning. But that should also be tied into the acceptance that the Planning will be flawed some individuals will be encouraged into courses where the demand will be lacking once they graduate (or some time after that) and some individuals will make errors in taking riskier course choices (in terms of likely outcomes).
The system would not be perfect but would be much better than a market based approach which has effectively led to the very outcome you highlight above and where the cost of that is borne by individuals.
Its the fifty shades approach that attracts: treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen.
We have a system based on Planning today, which - we both agree - does not produce people with the skills we need,
But I fail to see how removing all fees would solve the problem of getting people with the right skills.
I'll try and sum things up in a clearer and more coherent way.
Today we attempt to use Planning to manipulate the market and the consequences of the failures both in Planning and the market are borne by the individual students.
My solution is to get rid of the market by removing tuition fees and just resort to the pre 1990 system of planned place numbers. It will still be imperfect but at least our children will not bear the costs of that failure throughout their lives.
First, logistics. There is a very good reason why it tends not to be science courses that are expanded in tough times - they cost money to run. To take on more science undergraduates you need more fully-equipped labs, more equipment for those labs, more supervision of those labs for lab hours, and more materials to support and catalogue the research, as well as taking lecturing staff away from potentially lucrative industrial/medical research. That can't be flung up in five minutes. Moreover, the amount of money involved means that such courses, even at £9k a year, will always be run at a loss even before accounting for potential lost income elsewhere (surprisingly, the same is true of teacher training courses, which is the real reason why Gove has been trying so hard to get rid of them). As a result, the lifting of the cap on Russell Group recruitment means it is unlikely more science undergraduates will be recruited. It may lead to a massive expansion of liberal arts degrees, which are cheap to run and therefore, at £7.5k a time, profitable. As the research such academics do is also not especially lucrative, there is no problem (or less of one) in pulling them off research to teach instead. But is that what was needed or wanted, or is that an example of market failure?
The reason we have to have tuition fees (which as Dair correctly notes, are a graduate tax in all but name) is because with the rapid expansion of HE in the 1990s, it is no longer possible to see a clear correlation between higher education and higher earnings. Therefore, the graduates who do continue to earn more (for example, me) need to contribute more to support the HE sector to make up for those who don't. The obvious, over-riding snag in this logic is that our earnings over our lifetimes probably won't make up that gap. Even if I return to HE and become a Vice-Chancellor, I wouldn't pay enough to pay off my full loan before I was 50 under the new regime (incidentally, my loan is an earlier type anyway). So, even assuming that the Student Loan Company (familiarly known as the Stupid Loan Company because they are so inept at recovering money) don't mess up, we are staring at a colossal black hole in university funding about 10 years from now, and then the balloon will really go up.
I have no easy answers either way. However, I was told by no less than the then head of the Arts and Humanities Research Council that he thought within ten years meaningful historical research would be coming to an end because of the pressure. Then lecturers who failed to publish (most of them) will either be sacked or downgraded, and then the fun will start.
All in all, although I spent many years training and researching to be a lecturer, I think I am well out of it.
F1: BBC actually has a livefeed, but I'll probably stick with Sky's. The second test's winner must be Pascal Wehrlein, who got to drive the new Mercedes on Thursday and is now swanning about in the Force India.
On-topic: as has been noted previously, we may see tactical voting in Scotland for/against the SNP. I also agree we'll see some in England/Wales by Lib-Lab types, however, a lot of Lib Dem (formerly) voters have already jumped into bed with the reds. That alone would diminish tactical voting.
I feel sorry for the families of the girls. It's utterly beyond me how people of that age (well capable of reasoning for themselves) sees a group committing genocide, industrial scale rape, crucifying children and burning a man alive and think "Yep, those are the sorts of chaps I want to marry."
As an aside, I loathed the end of the BBC (at ten) report on this. It was something like "The best these girls can hope for is to become jihadi brides. The worst is to be bombed by British and American planes."
There's so much wrong with the final sentence. For a start, we're doing relatively few bombing runs. The coalition against ISIS is broad and includes regional nations. It makes it appear that we're somehow villainous for fighting ISIS because deluded morons or vicious bastards who happen to have chosen to forsake Britain and its values are there. And, last but not least, the worst is probably being kept as sexual slaves for a prolonged period.
I forsee an unstable Labour minority government, and a swift second election, which may well have a much firmer base for tactical voting. Second past the post is a good platform for the second election.
Just as 'Kippers are Tories on holiday' is the Tory's.
How about judging people on their individual merits
"And, last but not least, the worst is probably being kept as sexual slaves for a prolonged period."
The BBC is renowned for pussy-footing around. They girl's are going into a war zone and they think it will be exciting. If the media were more forthright they may discourage a few.
How about "IS are always looking for more spunk receptacles." Nasty but honest.
On the other hand, if Toth keeps campaigning on putting the NHS back in the hands of Andy Burnham you never know...
They will split between UKIP, Green and Labour, with a good chunk of the Anti Tory vote going to UKIP, especially in the southwest.
They included a piece about jihadi brides already over there encouraging women to come and join then. They didn't include a reminder of the mass rape ISIS fighters have committed.
I would have thought in any case that this was a web rather than TV based inspiration - and as we all know, policing the internet is almost as difficult as persuading Gordon Brown that he had made a mistake.
In the Con/Lab and Lib/Con marginals which is where most of the action is, the position is generally pretty clear, and I think tactical voting will be alive and well. Something that gets overlooked is that most voters don't really feel so partisan that they hate the next closest party. 2010 Labour voters feel irritated with the LibDems, but still generally prefer them to the Tories, and on the whole vice versa. There are almost no seats where Con, Lab and LD all have an obvious chance - Cambridge and, er...?
Do party leader approval ratings predict UK general election results?
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2015/02/21/do-party-leader-approval-ratings-predict-uk-general-election-results/
Mr. Doethur, indeed, but I'm not asking for (for example) the Jordanian pilot's death to have been played, just for facts to be reported when relevant to the news.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/11424780/I-feel-sorry-for-politicians-who-have-to-mix-with-the-public.html
The expansion of universities didn't suddenly gift the country more clever people, the net result of aiming for 50% of the country at university is people with 100 IQ now go to university, where as it used to be people of around 140 IQ (yes, I know about the limitations of IQ, but bear with me). This means by an large that we have a lot of less rigorous, less academically challenging degree courses than we used to have.
The upshot of this is we have people with less good degrees, or in any case more general, less useful degrees, with the same expectations in life as people with "good" degrees, and they are not going to be met, leading to lots of dissatisfied people. A lot of those people of middling ability would probably had a more fulfilling life, made more money, and been less dissatisfied had they followed a craft, vocation or trade.
Thousands of kids trundle off to university every year to do Drama or Media Studies with expectations of being on the TV. How much new talent does the BBC take on each year, and how many of those have media studies degrees ? Fingers of one hand I suspect. Having been disappointed in following that career they then look for a generic job that will accept their degree, but find themselves up against more able people with specialist degrees from higher powered universities and are often disappointed again.
In short the system raises expectations that the jobs market cant match, and leads to a lot of disappointed and disillusioned youngsters. A lot of young lads with very mediocre A-levels go to polyversity and study mechanical engineering, pass with a mediocre grade, and find that anywhere that is actually doing mech eng is taking more talented engineers from big name universities who accepted them because of their high grade A-levels. How many of those would have been much happier as a mechanic or a fitter, or joining REME.
However from the little I've picked up, the major problem is that students get a loan to pay for tuition, which is paid back - if the graduate over a period of time - if they reach a certain level of earnings.
The Universities get funded in effect by the Government, but the fly in the ointment, is an outstanding debt of £29 billion which will never be paid back, as the new graduates cannot get high paid jobs now or potentially in the future, in the UK.
Some how the money owed will have to be sorted out by writing off, as per the poll tax debts. Some one is going to deal with this sooner (cheaper) or later (increasingly more and more expensive).
Who is going to blink first?
(continued)
(b) I also think you slightly exaggerate the numbers who do FMTV Studies, and certainly most of those are aware that they will not go on TV. Since the BBC in any case effectively do not hire new talent, rather promoting from within and selecting from a very narrow circle, the point is moot. It's a degree to enjoy for 3 years, but not more than that - and in fairness, three enjoyable years are not something to sneer at on a personal level. A more pertinent question would be whether that is a good use of public resources given the loans incurred will almost certainly not be paid off.
(c) You may also find it interesting to study the minimum admissions criteria even for ex-polys. For such courses as you name it's comparatively high, and it's only getting higher - two Bs and a C would be nothing unusual, and that's only slightly below what I got (admittedly I got that 15 years ago under the old, more rigorous A-level system). I agree entirely however that many of them would find it more profitable and probably more enjoyable to do a proper apprenticeship, and in none of my schools have I had any false pride about advising leavers accordingly. Only problem is that you get lambasted by the parents for not being ambitious enough on behalf of their children, which is very irritating!
Yet, ironically, the university sector is arguably the most profitable branch of the quasi-public sector organisations (most are officially independent charities, but are almost all reliant on government funding to survive). One pound spent on a university - research or teaching - generates six in income for the local and indeed national economy through investment and spending. Also, because our universities do have genuine international reputations, they attract students and grants from all over the world which is good news for the balance of payments. Quietly, almost without being noticed, Higher Education has become an economic powerhouse.
The risk is that having created this goose, the short-sightedness of governments dating back over 25 years is threatening to kill it entirely, because as you note the current funding structure is only not a joke because it isn't funny.
You used to get these motivational type posters at schools stressing how not everyone is book smart for instance, but that they could be smart or talented in other areas, it was about finding what you are good at or like doing, and even as a young child you could look around and say that 50% of the people in a class would not find continued academic study to their liking or benefit (I ended up going to a middling university for a History degree, for info - purely because I like history, not because I thought it would have any vocational benefits), but it was clear that university was becoming an automatic option without adapting it suitably so that automatic option would benefit everyone, instead just diluting the benefit.
I read a comparison of it once to the supposed glut of 'bad' tv shows, in that it is not as though there are no good tv shows - there are many fantastic ones - it is just that there are so many more tv shows now, and about the same proportion of actually good writers and actors to populate them so it can seem like standards have slipped.
In fairness, I don't think things are as bad as sometimes feared, re standards. We could and do send a lot more people to university than we used to who do get a lot out of it and who wouldn't have had the same opportunities, but the arbitrary target did cause some of the problems you list, and was entirely predictable.
These days I am rather at the other end of the education system, I spend most of my time teaching 4-6 year olds to read and add up
Does not bode well for the Tories when they can hardly fill a bus.
EDIT - I meant to say as well that it is also of course now very difficult to kick people off university courses. If somebody fails a year, they can retake it. If they are booted off, the university has to go through a long and exhausting process to ensure that there is no comeback. If they do it too often, it impacts on their funding as well (high drop-out rates are considered). This strikes me as idiotic, and always did. I've taught people who would not get degrees without massive support, and they would have been better off working in Tesco. However, that's a fault of the system as much as the universities. Any chance you could instruct a few VCs and MPs as well? It's obvious most of them are incapable of at least the second...:-)
(And how do you get those nice emoticons?)
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/20/what-do-young-voters-think-about-free-speech
Keeping tuition fees out of Scotland is one of the reasons Nats are well ahead with ABCs.
Media studies gets the sort of flack that a century or more ago was directed at English. Why are universities awarding degrees for reading stories? Most degrees for most students are not particularly vocational, and that would be even more so were it not for those who become schoolteachers. Indeed, media studies graduates are among those most likely to find jobs.
And while there has been an element of dumbing down, much of that is a knock-on effect of changes to A-levels.
Your IQ argument too has a point, but remember it is mitigated by increased participation of bright working class kids who might never before have considered university, much as it was decades earlier by the participation of bright women.
Whether any of this was understood by the politicians who enacted it, or whether they really believed 80 per cent of people can have above-average earnings, is another question.
There appear to me to be all sorts of other questions about how much their parents or indeed the police/MI5 knew about it and if anything, why it was not stopped.
Is there much difference between being a Isil bride and an arranged marriage to a cousin ?
A culture (I use the term loosely) has developed whereby "I am offended" is deemed by some to constitute an argument against something. A culture where a leading current affairs programme (Newsnight) advocate the imposition of Islamic rules over depicting Mohammed on an atheist cartoonist in an allegedly secular nation. Where so-called journalists bleat craven appeasement when cartoonists are murdered in Paris.
There's a vast yawning chasm where political leadership and journalistic integrity ought to be. It's not all bad, not by any stretch, but nor is this situation a good or sustainable one.
Mr. G, one imagines their families do. That said, I recognise your point and suspect it's very widely felt.
I'll get my coat!
So why did they do it? Because the Civil Service liked it. Yet those people would, ironically, probably have been better administrators by studying Media Studies!
Incidentally, that's not to say I think we shouldn't start to move beyond that. The only problem is, defining what is or isn't a worthwhile degree. History? In fact, I would argue that's a very important subject, because it is hard to have a meaningful understanding of the present without it - but I'd be hard pushed to justify it economically. English? English literature/language is one of the richest and most varied in the world, and our cultural exports are very significant, but putting a figure on how much they earn us both from raw money and wider respect leading to other commissions would be a nightmare. Science? In theory that's easier - but you might be surprised at how many scientists end up working in other fields, e.g. civil servants or bankers, and given the expense of the degree, we might be back to a net loss. So I think there is always going to be an element of picking the subject/scheme you love and going with it to see what happens as @kle4 did.
And with that, I must go. Have a good morning.
In the era of 'all shall have prizes' (or 'ever rising standards' (sic)) that has gone out the window, and some subjects award 20% - 25% 'A, while other are stingier.....its a mess.....
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/
It's all a bit odd and I think more than a few people will have some very awkward questions to answer.
I highly recommend the Open University!
After an Oxford degree I airily thought 'how hard can this be'?
"Very", was the answer! But very rewarding too......
I read a bonkers article from a Law Professor at Chicago University to the effect that students are still children, children can't cope with viewpoints they find offensive, therefore it's right to ban speakers and publications they find offensive from campuses.
The UK Independence Party leader forecast that David Cameron is set to remain in Downing Street because he at least "looked like a leader."
But Ed Miliband was "not connecting" with traditional working-class voters.
Mr Farage's comments represented a softening of tone towards the Prime Minister and the Tories following recent clashes between the parties.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/559594/Conservatives-most-MPs-election-Nigel-Farage
When I was at uni I lived with someone on a 'management degree'. He never did any work, but was top of his class by virtue of possessing a brain cell. The content of his course could have been covered in a year.
For me, the solution is to part ways after GCSE level, some can do 2 or 3 year career focussed vocational courses/apprenticeships, others can spend 2 years preparing for university.
Mr. F (2), I wasn't in his class at the time, but an idiot lecturer at my university around the time of the protests against the Danish cartoons spoke out against them and in favour of the lunatic protesters.
In the Con/Lab and Lib/Con marginals which is where most of the action is, the position is generally pretty clear, and I think tactical voting will be alive and well. Something that gets overlooked is that most voters don't really feel so partisan that they hate the next closest party. 2010 Labour voters feel irritated with the LibDems, but still generally prefer them to the Tories, and on the whole vice versa. There are almost no seats where Con, Lab and LD all have an obvious chance - Cambridge and, er...?"
Morning, Nick. My point isn't that there won't be any tactical voting - there most certainly will. But I do expect it to be down, and probably well down, on previous years. Yes, Labour supporters do probably feel on the whole more inclined to the Lib Dems than the Tories but is this enough for them to opt for the Lib Dems over Labour in a Con/LD seat when the Lib Dems put the Tories in last time? Might not we see more (not all) of the Labour-inclined actually going Red in 2015?
A tactical vote is only worth the while if a voter sees their second-preference as only marginally inferior to the first and well ahead of the third.