Interesting Links for 04-06-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Brexit: 'Things can only get better' say experts

(tags:UK Europe trade )

2. What Rishi Sunak got wrong about maths

(tags:mathematics UK conservatives )

Comments

[liv]

2. Harford's piece is interesting. My impression is that Sunak isn't even "wrong" about maths, he just doesn't care. Numeracy! STEM! Employability! Yay! is just a meaningless soundbite like "build 40 new hospitals". Nobody ever intended to follow through, there's no funding, there's no intention to consult experts on how to improve numeracy, they just want low-information voters to vaguely associate the Conservatives with the hazy but basically positive idea of numeracy.

But it's amazing how easy it is to distract the commentariat into proudly declaring how much they hate maths, and that's why I think Harford is onto something. People really do have learned helplessness about this, just like the comparison of submitting an obvious ChatGPT response in place of homework, people really do think it's perfectly fine to proclaim basic errors of arithmetic from influential positions. (Except when it's Diane Abbot and then all the racist creeps come out in force.) I am reminded in a way of my grandmother; she was very bright but only had about 5 years of formal education in the 1920s, and that of a pretty low standard. So she spent her life being absolutely terrified of numbers; even as a shopkeeper in the pre-calculator, pre-decimal age, where from necessity she had to learn how to handle money and accounts, she still just found it fundamentally scary. What fixed her was not any "adult numeracy" initiative, but of all things the Sudoku craze when she was in her 80s. That turned out to be the key to getting over the terror of "I don't understand numbers". And having mastered standard sudokus which don't really involve any actual numerical skill, she moved on to the kinds that do include simple maths puzzles, and suddenly she was able to cope with stuff like dividing up bills or calculating change or understanding her bank account or scaling a recipe or dressmaking pattern without panicking.

[anef]

That's a lovely story about your grandmother - it's never too late! But your point about Sudoku is interesting - people who are scared of maths are put off Sudoku, when it could be letters or ideograms or any sort of pictures really. So it can work in the other direction, too.

[andrewducker]

I agree that people have learned helplessness about maths. There's definitely a "I just don't have the brain for it" approach that many people have, and I think that a lot of people could do better with the right help.

Maths feels very much like a subject where going on to the next level of understanding requires you to actually fully understand the current one. And sweeping on to the next topic without reaching that point with the last one seems likely to make many people unhappy without actually teaching them a lot. If you stay at, for instance, "addition", trying many different approaches, until you really understand it, then you'll probably manage the leap to subtraction. If you try to go on without it then I really do think you're doomed.

But, as you say, there is no plan. There's just handwaving and soundbites.

[hairyears]

Experts say... Well, Henig is the trade expert, and he says the trade morass does - at last - have a path to improvement.

The travel correspondent says there are simple measures that could make things better.

...And so on.

It's quite a leap from that, to saying 'Things can only get better'.

There are a number of ways in which Brexit can get much, much worse; some of them have received no press coverage at all.

Start with a money-laundering or VAT 'carousel' scandal, and a crackdown on banking services for sanctioned individuals close to the Putin regime (or the complete isolation of the British banking system if it turns out we're laundering resources used to corrupt the political process in an EU country); step forward to the EU banning all meat imports from the UK due to noncompliance with antibiotics regulations; and ask yourself whether any part of the UK motor industry and supply chain will exist, at all, before the hoped-for (but not yet real) progress in tariff negotiations...

Or, you know, continuing economic contraction until we hit a foreign-exchange crisis, or our debt burden becomes unsustainable.