Interesting Links for 26-9-2011

[andrewducker]

• UK firm unfairly dismissed employee for Facebook comments, Tribunal rules
  (tags: facebook business employment uk law)
• The TMBG experience - when The Onion's AV Club got invited onstage. All of them.
  (tags: TheyMightBeGiants music TheOnion)
• Greece's debt crisis, a handy flowchart of DOOM!
  (tags: debt greece euro finance economics)
• Watch an artist grow - everything they did from 2002-2010, a stunning change.
  (tags: art inspiration creativity)
• Beware the Purists, Lest They Kill Your Innovation
  (tags: innovation)
• An awesome looking concept phone. I'll believe it when I see it.
  (tags: phones mobile_phones technology samsung android)
• A Town Without Poverty?: Canada's only experiment in guaranteed income finally gets reckoning
  (tags: economics welfare politics canada poverty income)
• Women in Saudi Arabia 'to vote and run in elections'
  (tags: saudiarabia voting women politics)
• £6k versus £9k tuition fees: the real impact in pictures
  (tags: tuition academia money)

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

The real monetary impact in pictures, that is. The potential impact on who has the guts to take on all that debt to go to school, on attitudes toward debt in general, on the ethical character of our country... rather handy that those don't go quite so easily on graphs and charts, I think?

Oh, reading the last paragraph, it looks like my point was made for me:

Labour's argument is that the poorest are put off by the fear of debt rather than the actuality, and it is this fear that the fee cut is intended to address.

[andrewducker]

So what's needed is some education for people, to show that unless they are very unusual there is no difference to them? So they can base their decisions on what will actually affect them, rather than baseless fears?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Sure, that settles point (a) of the three I list above. Better plan would be to not introduce a system that generated fictional debt that will never be repaid in preference to a progressively funded education system. Given that, as everyone in power and out of it keeps observing, it would make no functional difference in terms of what's actually paid out by govt vs students, why exactly does it matter so much that that debt is written to the student in the first place?

(BTW this would be a 'Labour was/is wrong too' argument, in case that isn't clear. But lower fees are still a lesser evil from the POV of the character of the scheme.)

[andrewducker]

Oh, I agree that it's been badly done. It's _clearly_ actually a graduate tax for 95% of the people paying it, because they'll be paying a fixed percentage of their income for a fixed term after graduation. Why not, y'know, call it that instead?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Because this way they get to pretend that people are paying for their own education.

Look, functionally I am very well aware that this just isn't a big deal. I'm on the 15k repayment rate myself and likely to remain so, so I don't even get the extra bit of cushion (under the new system I'd have repayed nothing yet or for the forseeable) and I still barely notice it - and I have as much student debt as your average English student.

But the important question to ask here is: If this makes no difference to what's paid by whom, why are we even bothering?

(The question is rhetorical of course, the answer being: Tories are arseholes.)

[andrewducker]

The singular advantage to fees was supposed to be that people could choose whether to go to a university charging X or Y depending on whether they thought it was worth it.

But as the difference between repaying a £6k loan and a £3k loan is fuck all, and nobody seems to be charging less than that, it doesn't seem that that part has worked terribly well...

(I _am_ in favour of the 21k starting point, but that could be used with either version.)

[marrog.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I'm not that bitter on the 21k front. I think the difference in how it feels, month to month, having that tiny bit of loan out, is pretty negligible.

[andrewducker]

Oh, and of course it does matter to the richest people, who can actually pay it off faster. Guess which way they tend to vote :->