Flat tax in a developed economy

Via the ASI, the Cato Institute has a piece reporting that one Swiss Canton has introduced a flat tax with a rate of 1.8%.

Yes, you read it correctly, 1.8%. That's One Point Eight Percent.

The new tax regime in Oberwalden was introduced following a referendum in which 90% of voters voted in favour of the change.

One of the main barriers to the introduction on flat tax regimes in the developed world has been the argument, supported by bodies like the OECD, that this kind of system would not work in developed economies. We're about to see this argument tested empirically for the first time, and I've no doubt that the naysayers are going to be proved resoundingly wrong.

Where's a nice place to live in Oberwalden?  

Rolling back the last ten years

With all the polls predicting a Conservative government at the next election, it's reasonable to question what changes a Cameron government might make when they finally take control. To what extent might they be ready to roll back the last ten years of the expansion of the state, the erosion of civil liberties and corruption of civil society?

Do you think that Cameron will return habeus corpus to three days? Do you think he will privatise the schools or the hospitals, or restore the right to protest in the vicinity of parliament?

Me neither.

Assuming then that he continues with the policies of the Labour party; that the schools continue to decline, that the hospitals are hotbeds of infectious disease (if you can even manage to get an appointment). Suppose that detention without charge gets extended to forty or fifty days and that a whole plethora of new reasons to demand entry to your home are written into law.

What then?

Will people abandon political parties completely, and abandon the polling booth completely. Or will they switch to peripheral and/or extremist parties?

It seems to me that it doesn't actually matter, so long as they do one or the other. Any long-term solution to the political impasse into which the Lab/Con duopoly have driven us has to involve the death of both heads of the political monster which threatens us. Now some people might find this rather alarming - as any vote for an unfamiliar party can unnerve some - but when you think about it, it's not as alarming as being locked up for three months without charge because someone in government doesn't like the colour of your shirt, which seems to be the way things are heading at the moment.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I am lost to mainstream politics. They are all crooks, and they are all corrupt, and until they are all strung up from Westminster lampposts, or at least consigned to the political dustbin, we are all in danger.

Worstall on home education

Tim Worstall makes a robust defence of a parent's right to home educate their children, here.

Tim is responding to a piece at the Huffington Post by someone called Russell Shaw whose main objection seems to be that lots of religious people home educate, and that the children will end up being taught creationism. Shaw doesn't explain why this is worse than going to a state school and learning very little at all, but he does feel that home education isn't serving society very well.

Which is odd, because I thought that the point of education was to provide a benefit to the child, rather than to the state or "society". I'm reminded of the theories of John Taylor Gatto, the educational historian and writer, who believes that state education was designed to do just that - to provide dumbed-down workers for the factories of the upper classes, rather than educate anyone.

The comments thread on the Worstall post is also interesting, with some agreeing with the claim that home educators have mainly religious motivations. This may be true of the USA, but it's certainly not right for the UK. The main (if not the only) researcher into the UK home education movement is Paula Rothermel of the University of Durham. She has performed surveys into UK home-ed and has the following to say on why people do it:

Over half of the reasons given for home educating related to school, such as, 'unhappy with current school education', 'class sizes too large' and 'bullying'. Almost one-third of motivations listed were child-centred; 'we wanted to stimulate our child's learning', 'it is the child's choice' and 'meets out child's needs', and one in five parents describe their motivation in terms of their philosophy, referring to their' ideology', 'lifestyle', their 'faith' and the 'lack of morality in society'. When families become acquainted with other home educators, as well as related literature, they adopted a more philosophical approach to education generally, often believing that the present education system needed reform.

Clearly religion is not a significant factor, then. Most people just think that school is crap.

Another criticism given by Tim W's commenters is that home-educated children are "weirdos". Here, I'm less sure of my ground, because I can't say I've ever met a home educated child. I've seen some on the telly, and they do appear different to schooled children. The thing which has always struck me is that they seem rather polite, and very clear-eyed; they look people in the eye and say what they think. They lack the wariness around adults and the emotional ticks and affectations of your average teenager.

Whether this is enough to suggest a categorisation under "Weirdo" is a matter of personal taste.

When people think of home-educated children who have been filed under weird, they often bring up the mathematics prodigy, Ruth Lawrence, who went up to Oxford at the age of eleven, graduated at thirteen, became a fellow at Harvard at nineteen and is now a full professor. Whether she deserves to be called weird is not clear from what I've read. She is certainly gifted, but she seems to have a perfectly normal life (marriage, children and so on). I can remember a minor kerfuffle when she publicly stated some of her views at a debate and rather upset some of her fellow students who couldn't handle someone so young saying what they thought. This seems to me to be more of a criticism of the other students than of Ms Lawrence.

But historically, going to university in your mid-teens was the norm, rather than the exception.  In the medieval period, someone aged fourteen was expected to be able to manage their own affairs and to be able to study independently of family. So to that extent, it's modern schooled children who delay tertiary education until the age of eighteen that are the oddballs, the exceptions, the weirdos.

Perhaps this is why teenagers can be so vile. Underneath it all, they know they should have flown the coop, but the law says they can't.  On top of all the hormones, you get a prison sentence.

It's not really surprising that they can be a bit unpleasant is it?    

Hidden curriculum latest

In the previous post, I bleated about the refusal of my children's school to release the curriculum to me. I've been apopleptic pretty much ever since. Yesterday, however, a few details emerged on some of the innovations in the learning experience that are being promised for the new curriculum, which is being introduced over the next year or so.

From what I can gather, the powers that be in Holyrood are demanding that schools take responsibility for reducing levels of dental caries in children. To that end, my children's school will be extending its tooth brushing programme. We will have to wait for the details of how many days per week will be spent on brushing and whether the more able children will be set courses in flossing and advanced mouthwash.

We also gather that children are supposed to know how to deal with an adult having a heart attack in their presence. Whether this involves the issuing of a defibrillator to every five year old is not yet clear.

I hope nobody thinks I'm kidding about any of this. 

The secret curriculum

The Scottish 5-14 curriculum is much less prescriptive than the English National Curriculum. Instead of defining in gory detail exactly what is taught, central government in Edinburgh sets out to define what children should be acheiving and how schools should teach. But the actual content they teach is only defined in rather broad terms. The detail is, by and large, left to schools to decide.This seems to be rather better than the way things are done in England.

Or perhaps not.

Concerned by an apparent lack of history being studied, I asked at my children's school for a copy of the curriculum they were working to. Some weeks later I received a copy of some Scottish Executive information about the kind of children they hoped that schools would be turning out, and a copy of the themes around which the coursework would be based. The details for this term, by class,  are reproduced below.

 

Now to my untutored eye, this doesn't look anything like a curriculum. It looks like a series of pages selected at random from a tabloid newspaper. There's lots of environmentalism. There's no history. There's lots of surrogate parenthood. There's multiculturalism and perhaps some EU propaganda but apparently, no maths.

Now I know for a fact that there is maths being taught because I hear it from the children at the end of the day. Confused, I went back to the school again to find out what the story was. There must be more to it than this.

The answer is that there is more to it. The teachers apparently create plans based on the themes above, setting out exactly what it is they are going to teach in each class. "They're hanging lots of different subjects off each theme". Which sounds very interesting. Maybe it's OK, there's a systematic approach lurking there, unseen behind a bland list of themes.

Big problem. I'm not allowed to see the teaching plans. That's right, folks:

I'm not allowed to see what my children are being taught.

I'm paying thousands of pounds a year in return for which the state is going to provide my children with an education. And they won't tell me what the hell it is they're teaching them.

And beyond that, I don't know what to say.

A tribute to Al Gore

Tim Slagle's very funny take on global warming. (Via here) 

Climate cuttings 14

There's been no shortage of action on the climate front in recent weeks. In fact, the only reason I haven't been posting more often is the sheer effort of trying to stay abreast of everything as well as doing the day-job. Here then, is the climate news you may have missed.

We know that when you are making a reconstruction of the historic temperature from tree rings, you shouldn't use bristlecone pines (BCPs). This was the advice of the US National Academy of Sciences who observed that these species are thought to be prone to CO2 fertilisation - which is to say that increased growth might be due to more CO2 in the air, rather than temperature. Of course the IPCC doesn't care about this and uses BCPs all the time, most notoriously in the "Hockey Stick" graph. Now, a new paper from Craig Loehle finds that if you don't use any tree rings in your reconstruction, you don't get a hockey stick at all - in fact the medieval warm period looks warmer than the present. This is upsetting to "warmongers" who claim that the MWP was a local phenomenon.

Because of this the Loehle paper was attacked or ignored. Julien Emile-Geay, a colleague of hockey stick manufacturer, Michael Mann, gave a bravura performance in a thread at Climate Audit, in which he called the Loehle paper "pseudoscience" because, amongst other things, it didn't calculate error bounds. He become rather bashful when it was pointed out to him that none of his colleagues did this either. Nobody seemed to be able to explain how error bounds for this kind of reconstruction should be calculated. Which is odd, when you think about the idea that the science is apparently "settled".

Loehle's approach to calculating a global temperature turns out to have been rather unique. The proxies he used were each calibrated against local temperature to give a reconstructed local temperature record. Then the reconstructed temperatures for each locale were averaged to give a global temperature. This is very different to the way this kind of thing has been done in the wacky world of hockey stick climate science. Here, proxies of different kinds, some calibrated, some not, are aggregated and then some kind of a global temperature signal is looked for by statistical means. The idea is that proxies will correlate in some way with temperatures elsewhere in the world by means of something called "teleconnections". This seems, shall we say, unconvincing.

One of the proxies used in a recent temperature reconstruction was rainfall records. If you're wondering, these are thought to teleconnect to temperature, so you can look for a temperature signal in there.  This sounds daft enough, but when you learn that the coordinates of the locations used were not correctly aligned with the temperature data, so that, for example, the rainfall in Philadelphia was compared to the temperature in Bombay, it sounds truly crazy. However the really amazing, fall-off-your-chair laughing bit, is that this error had also been observed in one of the author's previous papers, and that he had had his gaffe pointed out to him then! And the author? Hockey stick guy, Michael Mann! Who else?

Meanwhile a recent PhD thesis raises important questions about some of the bristlecone pine records. The hockey stick graph is driven by a surge in growth in bristlecone pine trees in the latter half of the twentieth century. One of the most important such records is the Graybill chronology from Sheep Mountain. The new thesis updates these records, but shows none of the growth surge that was previously reported. Unfortunately, no attempt was made to reconcile the two sets of records, but this would appear to kill the hockey stick stone dead. Not that this will bother the IPCC who will, no doubt, continue to use it.

If you've seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", you will remember the long, long graph with the surge in temperatures at the end, which was incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is warming in an unprecedented fashion... apparently. Gore claimed that the graph was from ice core records and that it therefore supported the hockey stick and refuted its critics. Except it wasn't from ice cores at all, it was just a reprint of the hockey stick itself. Yes folks, he made it up.

In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I reported Tim Worstall's observation that the global warming panic should recede, now that the global economy seems to be following the Stern report's "warmer but richer" scenario, rather than the more unpleasant poorer one. Now Tim has also reported that the whole crisis should be over in a couple of decades because of the rapidly falling price of solar cells. The end of the carbon economy is is sight. Don't do something - stand there!

Reports that sea level will rise when the Greenland ice sheet melts are less certain than previously advertised. The glaciers are sitting in a bowl of rock.  It has been demonstrated that James Hansen at NASA knew this, but made his scaremongering claims of sea level rise anyway.

According to satellite records, October was the second coolest month on record. 

There is no link between global warming and typhoon activity. 

Northern latitudes should be warming fastest, according to global warming theory. Why then is there no warming apparent in the Baltic?

Global warming might thin cirrus clouds and release all the extra heat, according to a new paper.

And that's it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.

Light blogging

Well, I haven't written anything for a while now. It's all too depressing - I think Bruno feels the same way. Then again, perhaps it's the weather.

Public school education for free

File under hypocritical lefties:

Fiona Millar, AKA Mrs Alastair Campbell, is a journalist and a prominent campaigner for comprehensive education. Comment is Free regularly provides a pulpit from which she can unleash fire and brimstone at anyone who might be tempted to interest themselves in selective admission procedures, school choice or similar heresies against the Church of the Bog Standard Comp Triumphant.

Her latest jeremaiad was this piece at CiF on Monday, if you can bear it.

The amusing part about her article was not what she wrote herself (or even the sad fact that she can't seem to find a photo of herself in which she doesn't look like a harpy), but is actually a posting by a commenter calling himself Gerry M.

What Mr M points out is that Ms Millar seems to have contracted that strange affliction of well off left-wing parents which compels them to ensure that their own children get a rather different education to the one they demand for us proles. Well known examples like Ruth Kelly and Diane Abbott abound. The establishment our Fiona chose for her darling son Rory was the William Ellis School in Highgate. This is a state school quite unlike any other state school you've ever come across before. In fact, it's quite hard to find many differences between it and a rather expensive private school.

According to the Wikipedia article linked above, it has a budget of £13 million to spend on around 1000 pupils. For those who learned mathematics at a more traditional comprehensive school, that's £13,000 per pupil. It's pupils are all boys (which doesn't seem very comprehensive to me). It has playing fields, blazers, celebrity visitors (Alastair Campbell, Sir Clive Woodward, Michael Palin, June Sarpong, Brian Lara, David Miliband and Professor Tim Brighouse), and "newly completed Art studios, Technology and Science teaching spaces and [a] state-of-the-art Sports Hall". If music is your thing it's got a "24-track  sound and music editing suite with the latest computer technology" and can offer music tuition in just about any instrument you care to mention. All that seems to be missing is the stables for darling Rory's ponies, but hey, this is central London.

All I can say is "Wow!" And to think that some people pay to go private! 

Our Fiona is, of course, very much against academies and trust schools - she says that LEA control is the ideal that schools should aspire to. How then to explain her choice of a "voluntarily maintained" school, a majority of whose governors are appointed by an independent trust? Shouldn't she be repulsed by a school which became a specialist language school in 1997?

It's hard to imagine the mindset which would allow someone to justify this sort of hypocrisy to themselves. A normal person, with a normal conscience would cringe every time the thought crossed their mind. Is Fiona Millar such a person?

She doesn't look bovvered, does she?

 

Adam Smith abducted by aliens

Has something happened to the Adam Smith Institute? They seem to have a new, very corporate-style website (yuk). The blog appears to be there, but there's no RSS feed. No word of explanation - no nothing.

Have they all been abducted by aliens or something? 

ID cards

In the email this morning, this from Phil Booth of NO2ID:

Hello, you have received this message because you signed my pledge, "I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge" back in 2005. In fact 11360 other people also did. Thank you all.

The legal powers to bring ID cards into use are now starting to be applied, and NO2ID want their money. Even if you didn't sign up for the pledge, be a sport and stick a cheque in the post, there's a good thing.

Cheques payable to NO2ID should be sent to:

NO2ID (Legal Defence Fund)
Box 412
19-21 Crawford St
London W1H 1PJ 

Do it today.   

Teaching to the test

Matthew Sinclair has an interesting post about getting a broad education. Having been to a state school he feels that he may have missed out on some of the things his privately educated counterparts may have enjoyed.

I just haven't had the same broad exposure and introduction to subjects beyond the exam, to the broader current of human knowledge, that many public school students have. I labour at remedying this but I'm starting from quite a distance behind.

He reckons that this is because many of his teachers may have been teaching to the test rather than seeking to educate the kids in their care.

Having also enjoyed the dubious benefits of a state education, I think he's right here. The other day, I was lurking at a home education forum where there was a discussion of how home-ed children who went up to universities couldn't work out why their schooled classmates only seemed to want  to know what was likely to be tested. Schooled children were just not interested in getting in-depth knowledge. They were, well, schooled, rather than educated.

Matthew quite correctly points out that we can probably deal effectively with this problem by extending the free market in education so that it covers all schools rather than just schools for the rich.

This point was also touched on briefly in a rather fiery exchange between DK and Dave Osler on Vox Politix the other night. Dave O seemed to think that education vouchers would further entrench the privilege of the wealthy (or words to that effect). This seems to me to be a completely bizarre argument. Making education for the poor and middlingly wealthy more effective is surely reducing the privileges of the wealthy. In the same way that most people can buy a car now (but the wealthy can afford swanky ones with leather seats and unuseable top speeds) we could have a system in which everyone got an education (as opposed to schooling) while the rich could afford a swanky one with top hats and stabling for Jemima's ponies.

If we sit back and ask what we want from the education system, the answer is that we want childen to get the broad knowledge of the world - "the best of all that has been known" - that Matthew and I didn't get. We can only give them this if we give them the same advantages - namely a private education - that the rich give their children.

Another underqualified environmental correspondent

Timmy notes another piece of half-witted environmental journalism, this time from Fiona Harvey of the FT. Ms Harvey notes that the Thames Barrier is being raised more often than in the past (climate change is the culprit of course), while apparently being ignorant of the fact that the south-east of England is sinking at 2.3mm per year.

Fiona Harvey has a degree in English Literature from Cambridge University.

It figures. One can't help but notice that there is something of a theme developing here?

Never mind the science, feel the empathy. 

Peter Horrocks and the truth

Some weeks ago I mentioned a posting on the BBC editors blog by Peter Horrocks, the head of BBC news in which he claimed that the BBC did not have a line on "climate change".

BBC News certainly does not have a line on climate change, however the weight of our coverage reflects the fact that there is an increasingly strong (although not overwhelming) weight of scientific opinion in favour of the proposition that climate change is happening and is being largely caused by man.

He also said this:

It is not the BBC's job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject. However we can make informed judgements and that is what we will continue to do.

This was all said in the context of a proposed "Planet Relief" special - a weekend in which the whole network would be devoted to programmes on global warming. Eventually Planet Relief was pulled from the schedules, as even the BBC thought it would be unable to brush off questions about its partiality.

Now, however, it seems that the corporation are trying to do exactly what Horrocks said they wouldn't do. According to Rifait Jawaid, again on the BBC editors blog, there is to be a new special about the impact of climate change in Bangladesh.

I think James Sales, who I know from my World Service days, has done a great job by single-handedly taking this project to fruition. I'm told that it was James who first mooted the idea of this [...] show to create awareness on climate change amongst the poverty stricken Bangladeshis.

 [My emphasis]

So here we have a programme which seeks to lead opinion among its audience, something which directly contradicts the claims of Peter Horrocks from just a few months ago. Could someone be telling fibs, we wonder?

I've left a comment on Jawaid's blog post, pointing out this apparent anomoly. I wonder if it will be published? 

Get voting

Just a reminder to get your votes in for Climate Audit at the Weblogs award. CA is just ahead now.

Get voting, here.