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I agree that a very large number of the problems are social, but I disagree that they're not being solved because "the system works to prevent those people from

I agree that a very large number of the problems are social, but I disagree that they're not being solved because "the system works to prevent those people from getting into positions where they can fix it." I mean, hell, just strike up a conversation at the pub and you'll find people who "have a very clear about why" everything is broken. Everyone has a pet theory that they're sure is correct. And in that sense the system is doing exactly what we want it to do: it's keeping out the infallibilists, the people who will advance their pet theories in spite of people on all sides pointing out the problems with it. No matter how well-intentioned those people are, it's a very bad idea to hand them the Big Stick of Government if they're going to keep wielding it when we want them to stop. And it's particularly bad if they intend to make sweeping changes - if we're going to be futzing with such powerful structures, we should be taking baby steps! It's much safer for us to keep the government populated with vote-seeking politicians, and instead to turn out attention to where it should be, which is getting the solutions into the culture. If the electorate all want a particular change, then the politicians will make that change. And if they don't all want a particular change then we shouldn't be imposing it on them. And if they don't care, we should persuade them to - "X doesn't affect you directly, but it will help us make Y cheaper for you" can be effective. If the change really does make a better world for everyone - and not just advancing the interests of one group at the expense of another - then it should be possible to show them that. I mean, heck, in the US there's an oil billionaire who funds billboards that just advertise "being confident" or "having perseverance." How cool is that? As cultural engineering goes it's pretty crude, but it's a damn good start. And if your response to this post is "but changing culture is practically impossible," then, well. I think you just found your lack of innovation ;-)

Silhouette 14y ago
I mean, hell, just strike up a conversation at the pub and you'll find people who "have a very clear about why" everything is broken. Everyone has a pet theory that they're sure is correct. And in that sense the system is doing exactly what we want it to do: it's keeping out the infallibilists, the people who will advance their pet theories in spite of people on all sides pointing out the problems with it. Of course if we're going to get anywhere we have to distinguish strong, uninformed opinions from strong, well-informed ones. But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more. Every year, schools and government ministers trot out the same kinds of argument about better teaching methods and pupils working harder to justify the ever-rising percentages of candidates receiving top grades. They look pretty foolish next to a critic holding up an 'A' level exam paper that pupils used to take before leaving school at 18 in one hand, and a first year university exam paper taken at 19 from a decade later with essentially the same question on it, or the equivalent with an old 'O' level paper that kids would have taken at 16 a generation ago with more demanding questions than an 'A' level paper kids take at 18 today. You can only bury your head in the sand for so long before bad things start to happen, but successive governments who want everyone to be seen to succeed have been pushing the education establishment in this direction for a long time, and most of the teachers who knew better have retired by now. The only victims in this will be the children, and to some extent the new generation of teachers who are doing their best and perhaps do have some genuinely improved teaching methods to offer, yet who are perpetually vilified for being part of a system that is not their fault. It's much safer for us to keep the government populated with vote-seeking politicians, and instead to turn out attention to where it should be, which is getting the solutions into the culture. If the electorate all want a particular change, then the politicians will make that change. Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions. That's about as serious as it gets. Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home. I realise that the anti-Happy-Birthday lobby is a strong one, but that's going a little far. (And when the government did consult on fixing copyright, and close to 100% of the responses received from the public came down the same way on copyright term extension, Sir Cliff won anyway.) There is a reason that "campaign finance reform" or whatever you call it locally is always on the political agenda but never gets anywhere. When all you have is an election every few years, and between elections there is no power of recall or ability to force a referendum on a single issue or other strong check on government authority, money talks louder than any concerned individual because a good campaign will win over enough less concerned individuals to make a bigger difference. And that's before you even get to our special kind of politics in Europe where if something isn't palatable to the national electorate you just kick it over to the unelected guys in Brussels, let them push through what you want, and then claim that the EU made you do it. Did I mention that a lot of people are politically apathetic these days, because they don't feel their votes make a real difference? :-)
- Superpig 14y ago
  But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more. Absolutely, but they're a tiny force compared to the parents who all want to send their children to top universities and will vote for any government measure that claims to guarantee that. If a party proposed outlawing university entry requirements, the vast majority of parents would vote for it in a heartbeat and begin making plans to send their kids to Oxbridge or wherever. They don't understand that such a thing would cause those universities to no longer be top universities - at least from a career prospects point of view. And that's my point: for successive governments to want "everyone to be seen to succeed," the electorate needs to be complicit in that. They have to see such things as success. If they didn't see University as inherently better than the alternatives - the result of thinking that more education is always good, and that formal institutions like universities are the only way to get more education - then they wouldn't consider a policy of increasing university intake to be valuable. The only victims in this will be the children The victims in this aren't the children: the victims are everyone. We all suffer from the system being broken. Some more directly than others - being unable to find competent workers is probably less upsetting than being pushed into enduring 3-4 years of timewasting - but everyone to some extent. And yes, that includes the politicians who, at the end of the day, want to buy quality products and to work with competent people, just like the rest of us. Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions. Hold on, there. We're talking about whether the government does what the people want or not; if it manipulates them into wanting something in particular, that's a separate issue, so the false evidence point isn't relevant here; many groups manipulate the public, not just the government. And "millions of protestors" do not make for a collective stance on an issue: the largest single anti-war protest was 1 million people in February 2003 - 2% of the population - but a month later YouGov were reporting that 50% of their survey group supported the war. Public opinion was at best divided - it was certainly not united behind one course of action while the government took another. Anyway, one contentious counterexample does not a correlation make. Can you show a substantial trend of the government acting against majority polling figures across many issues? Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home. Sure. But so what? They're not enforcing those laws. It's not ideal that they're on the books, but changing the books is expensive and it's better to spend the resources on making changes that are actually connected to the rest of the system. Considering purely what's statutory is taking things out of context.

Silhouette 14y ago

I mean, hell, just strike up a conversation at the pub and you'll find people who "have a very clear about why" everything is broken. Everyone has a pet theory that they're sure is correct. And in that sense the system is doing exactly what we want it to do: it's keeping out the infallibilists, the people who will advance their pet theories in spite of people on all sides pointing out the problems with it. Of course if we're going to get anywhere we have to distinguish strong, uninformed opinions from strong, well-informed ones. But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more. Every year, schools and government ministers trot out the same kinds of argument about better teaching methods and pupils working harder to justify the ever-rising percentages of candidates receiving top grades. They look pretty foolish next to a critic holding up an 'A' level exam paper that pupils used to take before leaving school at 18 in one hand, and a first year university exam paper taken at 19 from a decade later with essentially the same question on it, or the equivalent with an old 'O' level paper that kids would have taken at 16 a generation ago with more demanding questions than an 'A' level paper kids take at 18 today. You can only bury your head in the sand for so long before bad things start to happen, but successive governments who want everyone to be seen to succeed have been pushing the education establishment in this direction for a long time, and most of the teachers who knew better have retired by now. The only victims in this will be the children, and to some extent the new generation of teachers who are doing their best and perhaps do have some genuinely improved teaching methods to offer, yet who are perpetually vilified for being part of a system that is not their fault. It's much safer for us to keep the government populated with vote-seeking politicians, and instead to turn out attention to where it should be, which is getting the solutions into the culture. If the electorate all want a particular change, then the politicians will make that change. Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions. That's about as serious as it gets. Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home. I realise that the anti-Happy-Birthday lobby is a strong one, but that's going a little far. (And when the government did consult on fixing copyright, and close to 100% of the responses received from the public came down the same way on copyright term extension, Sir Cliff won anyway.) There is a reason that "campaign finance reform" or whatever you call it locally is always on the political agenda but never gets anywhere. When all you have is an election every few years, and between elections there is no power of recall or ability to force a referendum on a single issue or other strong check on government authority, money talks louder than any concerned individual because a good campaign will win over enough less concerned individuals to make a bigger difference. And that's before you even get to our special kind of politics in Europe where if something isn't palatable to the national electorate you just kick it over to the unelected guys in Brussels, let them push through what you want, and then claim that the EU made you do it. Did I mention that a lot of people are politically apathetic these days, because they don't feel their votes make a real difference? :-)

Superpig 14y ago
But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more. Absolutely, but they're a tiny force compared to the parents who all want to send their children to top universities and will vote for any government measure that claims to guarantee that. If a party proposed outlawing university entry requirements, the vast majority of parents would vote for it in a heartbeat and begin making plans to send their kids to Oxbridge or wherever. They don't understand that such a thing would cause those universities to no longer be top universities - at least from a career prospects point of view. And that's my point: for successive governments to want "everyone to be seen to succeed," the electorate needs to be complicit in that. They have to see such things as success. If they didn't see University as inherently better than the alternatives - the result of thinking that more education is always good, and that formal institutions like universities are the only way to get more education - then they wouldn't consider a policy of increasing university intake to be valuable. The only victims in this will be the children The victims in this aren't the children: the victims are everyone. We all suffer from the system being broken. Some more directly than others - being unable to find competent workers is probably less upsetting than being pushed into enduring 3-4 years of timewasting - but everyone to some extent. And yes, that includes the politicians who, at the end of the day, want to buy quality products and to work with competent people, just like the rest of us. Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions. Hold on, there. We're talking about whether the government does what the people want or not; if it manipulates them into wanting something in particular, that's a separate issue, so the false evidence point isn't relevant here; many groups manipulate the public, not just the government. And "millions of protestors" do not make for a collective stance on an issue: the largest single anti-war protest was 1 million people in February 2003 - 2% of the population - but a month later YouGov were reporting that 50% of their survey group supported the war. Public opinion was at best divided - it was certainly not united behind one course of action while the government took another. Anyway, one contentious counterexample does not a correlation make. Can you show a substantial trend of the government acting against majority polling figures across many issues? Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home. Sure. But so what? They're not enforcing those laws. It's not ideal that they're on the books, but changing the books is expensive and it's better to spend the resources on making changes that are actually connected to the rest of the system. Considering purely what's statutory is taking things out of context.