The Big Society: can it work?

The Big Society was the grand plank of the Conservative Party manifesto for the United Kingdom general election of 2010, and it has become part of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement. Proposed laws incorporating parts of the program have been introduced in Parliament. But what is the Big Society? Can it work? And if not, then how could it be made workable?

A good place to begin an examination of this concept is Conservative leader David Cameron’s November 2009 Hugo Young Lecture where he expounded upon the idea in considerable detail. Essentially, Cameron believes that through a combination of political decentralisation and subsidiarity, greater transparency and increased accountability, the general public can have greater power vis à vis  the services they use, better determine how their tax monies are spent, and shape how their local area is run. The state will focus on giving support to social entrepreneurs – one of the main purposes of the Big Society Bank, which had secured £200m in funding at the time of writing – and community activists, and on somehow prompting ‘a broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’ in the rest of the population. All this is towards the purported aim of eradicating poverty and producing a fairer Britain.

So much for the theory, but can it work in practice? As things stand, this appears uncertain. While few would argue against more devolvement and openness, the relegation of the state to a cheerleader role in accomplishing this end is unpromising. The more active purposes still reserved for state intervention are either remarkably modest in ambition, or alternatively so gargantuan and diffuse that it is hard to see how a government initiative could fulfil them, something that Cameron himself seems to acknowledge in his speech.

However, this is not to say that the Big Society is irremediable – provided, that is, the state applies some imagination and funding in the following areas:

1. Education. Cameron places great emphasis on education as a means of reducing poverty and increasing equality of opportunity and outcome, but in his speech there is barely an allusion to the appalling educational standards that blight very significant chunks of British society. The United Kingdom is a country in which functional illiteracy is a genuine problem and where the percentage of students gaining five grades A*-C at GCSE is around 50%; a similar proportion leave school without a basic science qualification, and around 70% do not attain a grade C or higher in a foreign language. Much more attention should be focused on forestalling this mind-altering waste of talent.

2. Transportation Infrastructure. Investment in transportation infrastructure is a sine qua non for engendering and maintaining a society in which the constituent parts feel connected. While some parts of the UK’s travel infrastructure – particularly its airports – are in many ways exemplars, other parts, particularly the country’s railways, are less good than comparable systems in many emerging markets, let alone developed countries.

3. Taxation. Another non-negotiable in putting flesh on the bones of the Big Society is the reform of tax legislation. In particular, there must be much stricter laws – and very public criminal prosecution of those that break them – pertaining to tax avoidance and evasion by the wealthy, since these all too routine practices are severely subverting many people’s belief that there is such a thing as society at all; furthermore, the UK’s tax base is being pulverised by the failure of some of the wealthiest people in the country to pay their way.

4. Public Space. There is no escaping the fact that there is nothing like great public spaces – well-maintained parks, fountains, playgrounds and pedestrian zones – to help create the feeling of community that Cameron so evidently desires.

5. Family. If families are the building blocks of communities and therefore society, then are moderate tax breaks really the best we can do for them? In Singapore, the government helps create them through running a dating agency, the Social Development Unit. This specific measure may run into some cultural logjams in the UK, but the importance of considering alternative ways of thinking about these issues should not be underestimated.

Show me the money: the multi-million dollar argument for higher education in the United States and beyond

With new universities breaking ground everywhere from Assam to Anatolia, and with the American higher educational model being the world’s pre-eminent one – US universities hold eight of the top ten places in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University – it makes sense to examine what kind of effect on the future financial prospects of their students these virgin academic institutions are attempting to emulate. What does the possession of higher educational qualifications mean for the typical graduate of an American university?

The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings, a 2002 report published by the US Census Bureau, presents a wealth of data that seems to prove quite conclusively that the effect of educational achievement on income is a profound one. Some of the key points – with all income figures in 1999 dollars – include:

1. The average annual earnings of full-time, year-round workers aged between 25 and 64 years old educated to high school diploma level was $25,900.00;

2. The equivalent workers in possession of a bachelor’s degree commanded an average annual income of $52,200.00;

3. Those with professional degrees (e.g. in fields such as law or medicine) had average annual earnings of $99,300.00;

4. While the 40-year earnings estimate for high school dropouts was a total income of $1.0m, those with bachelor’s degrees could expect an income of $2.1m over the same period, and individuals with professional degrees $4.4m in compensation for a lifetime of toil;

5. The space in the economy for less educated workers is shrinking: in 1975, full-time, year-round workers without a high school diploma earned 0.9 times the earnings of those with a high school diploma, but by 1999 this income level had been eroded to just 70% of the earnings of the same comparison group. Meanwhile, workers with an advanced degree saw their average earnings increase from 1.8 to 2.6 times the mean income of high school graduates.

With the attainment of higher educational qualifications making a difference in earning capacity of literally millions of dollars over the working lifetime of an individual, education in the United States would appear to be a no-brainer, a state of affairs that much of the world wishes to replicate.

Want to beat the recession? Surf the BRICI boom!

The recent release of the Q4 growth figures for the United Kingdom, which revealed that an economic contraction took place in what is traditionally by far the most lucrative quarter for a great many UK businesses, should make it fairly clear that any recovery from a recession which many have compared to the Great Depression is not going to be straightforward, with even the tactic of adding a few extra digits to the money supply not proving enough to dispel the clouds of economic gloom.  And while the figures for the United Kingdom are particularly sobering, from the United States to Spain large parts of the developed world are facing structural macroeconomic problems that signal the long-awaited return to growth may not occur any time soon.

In times like these, entrepreneurs – particularly those with knowledge and skills in the digital economy – would be well-advised to pore through the illuminating Boston Consulting Group (‘BCG’) report, The Internet’s New Billion: Digital Consumers in Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia. This 2009 publication provides a wealth of information on online activity in a group of countries – termed the ‘BRICIs’ by BCG – that represent scarcely conceivable opportunities for enterprises based in a largely stagnant (post-)industrial world.

The following information is of particular salience:

1. In 2009, the BRICIs represented about 45% of the world’s population and around 15% of the planet’s GDP. 610 million Internet users lived in these territories;

2. By 2015, these countries will possess more than 1.2 billion people utilising the Internet;

3. The number of PCs in the BRICIs is set to more than double in the six years from 2009 to over 880 million;

4.  As of 2009, the BRICI countries had about 1.8 billion mobile telephone subscriptions, compared with a combined total of 394 million in Japan and the US;

5. 60% of BRICI digital consumers are under 35 years old and are very quick to adapt to new ways of using technology. Education is especially prized in the BRICI nations, and has helped spur the growth of the Internet in these economies; young people are especially keen on using instant messaging services to discuss homework.

Developed world entrepreneurs take note: the digital markets of tomorrow are here already. And a First World recession is all the more reason to explore them.

Tunisia: the first domino or an Arab aberration?

Novelist-turned-filmmaker Charles Michel Duke recently blogged about events in the Maghreb, posing the fascinating question of whether other Arab publics may follow Tunisia’s example of ‘regime change’.

While it is difficult to predict these things with any precision, this issue seems to illustrate as much as anything else the problems with treating the Arab world as monolithic bloc. Tunisia, while in some ways better administered than many developing countries, contained numerous ingredients that made popular revolt more likely: a much-disliked head of state; an educated, young population which is struggling to perceive a prosperous future; and endemic human rights abuses.

Prima facie, it may seem that some other Arab countries share one or more of these attributes, but the reality on the ground is far more complex. For example, while Kuwait is many respects heavily-centralised and autocratic, it vaunts one of the most lavish welfare states anywhere on earth: this is, after all, a country where the government regularly cancels consumer debt incurred by its citizens. While the Jordanian people are experiencing austerity, in Queen Rania they possess one of the very few world leaders who is almost universally admired.

In all likelihood, change in Arabic-speaking countries – much like elsewhere in the world – is most likely to happen where the public have little incentive to support the status quo and where, like a Fry and Laurie sketch, things are truly grey and hopeless: ruling classes with legitimacy crises, chronic unemployment, plummeting standards of living and a paucity of basic freedoms. Perhaps the most significant thing about the Jasmine Revolution is that a region that many associate with all that is retrocessionary has begun to become synonymous with a kind of change that even ten days ago seemed beyond the realms of possibility.

The University of Goldman Sachs: an answer to fiscal illiteracy?

A recent editorial by Allister Heath in City A.M., the free London tabloid focusing on the financial services industry, is thought-provoking on several levels. His call for the Square Mile to help tackle the alarming levels of fiscal cluelessness in the United Kingdom is a potentially pertinent one, particularly in a nation where the average person only has around £2,200.00 (approximately 1.7 months’ average salary) set aside in savings and where 25% of people have nothing set aside at all.

However, Heath’s editorial is also an indirect reminder as to how much of the education that children and adults receive in the UK – which possesses an educational system that has (and in some ways still is) the subject of global admiration – is eye-wateringly irrelevant to what most students would actually find useful in their lives. Subjects as different as information technology, domestic science and philosophy/religion – all of which shape vast and fundamental areas of human existence – barely find any meaningful room on most syllabi. The result – a workforce which regards logging onto Facebook as the acme of technological excellence, lives off ready meals and struggles to find purpose in existence – does not provide any reassurance about the country’s economic future. But even more importantly, it is probably not making very many people ultimately satisfied, either.

Higher education in China: authoritarian perestroika in action

The Chinese higher education system, as Ning Rong Liu highlights in his informative paper ‘Restructuring China’s adult higher education: an examination of the driving forces behind the reform’ (Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 13:1, 107-121), has been heavily influenced by two main models: that of the USA, starting in the nineteenth century and which is also the dominant model today, and during the mid-twentieth century, the paradigm prevalent in the Soviet Union.

Since 1985, higher education in China has been the subject of all kinds of reforms, changes inspired largely by the perception that China needed a comprehensive overhaul of its tertiary education system in order to prosper in a new globalised, marketisation-defined era.

In 2006, results of a survey conducted at the Cross-Strait Forum on Continuing Education ranked seven factors underpinning the restructuring of adult higher education in China in the following order:

1. The forces of economic reforms and development of the market economy in the country;

2. The rising demand for professional talent resulting from rapid economic development;

3. The impact of the increasing enrolment in China’s regular institutions of higher education;

4. The impact of the global trend of decentralisation and marketisation in higher education on China;

5. The acceptance of the concept of life-long learning and its significance in Chinese society;

6. An experiment in adult higher education for the purpose of gaining valuable experience for broader reforms in higher education;

7 A new way to raise funds for universities due to the insufficient financial support from the state.

From this, there appears to be little doubt that the values of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ have permeated the Chinese higher education system.

China’s route to producing world-class universities: all in the ratios

As most people who read Li Lixu’s excellent paper on the 1998-2003 reforms to the educational system in the People’s Republic of China will attest to, China has undoubtedly made significant progress in reforming its tertiary education sector. In particular, the ambition of Projects 211 and 985 – while perhaps slightly hopeful in terms of the applicable timescale to transform the best Chinese universities into world-class institutions – is to be applauded.

However, the reforms have led to at least one unfortunate development: while in 1994, the ratio of students to staff in regular higher educational institutions was an enviable 2.7:1, the massive expansion in student numbers led to a doubling of the ratio of students to staff in the period 1999-2004.

Especially with regards to its elite institutions, it appears that the Chinese authorities are missing a trick here: low student-tutor ratios are essential to the high-quality transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. If universities at Peking and Tsinghua are to be elevated to a world-class level, emulating (or devising an equivalent of) the Oxbridge tutorial system – where the student-staff ratio is often 1:1 – may be regarded as a sine qua non.

Edin Dzeko: the Bosnian education system’s finest export?

Edin Dzeko, Manchester City’s new £27.5m/€32m signing from VfL Wolfsburg, is known for his stunning repertoire of footballing skills which were evident to anyone who was lucky enough to see his scoring debut for the Bosnia-Herzegovina national team: a 3-2 win against Turkey in a Euro 2008 qualifier.

However, what has really captured the attention of this blog in recent days has been the fact that the charming Dzeko – who does not have the benefit of a university education – speaks and comprehends English to a level which is astounding given that until now he has never spent any time of note in an English-speaking country. At a time when many English players are struggling to express themselves in their native language, this is sobering indeed and begs several questions. Is the Bosnian education system doing something superior to the English system with respect to language acquisition? What, if anything, can be learnt from it? And will the days when England internationals such as Chris Waddle and Gary Lineker went abroad and learnt foreign languages to a very high level ever return?

Will the UK economy remain competitive under Generation Z?

It is often lamented in the UK that standards of literacy and numeracy are not what they used to be. However, the British economy may be facing an even more profound problem in years to come: a generation whose oral communication skills are so poor that basic social intercourse may prove challenging. In a September 2004 article, Martin Jacques cited a report from the now defunct Basic Skills Agency dating from the previous year: ‘teachers claim that half of all children now start school unable to speak audibly and be understood by others, to respond to simple instructions, recognise their own names or even count to five’.

We may well be living in the ego-market society that Jacques describes. But will such a generation of people be able to perpetuate even this imperfect state of affairs?