Re: Man of the People : Fri Jan 03, 2020 9:23 pm  

IR80 wrote: meamwhile I am sure Jeremy has an invite to pay his condolansces...https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-50986185 What are you talking about even the Americans are questioning the validity of his actions. The problem is that just saying we had information with Trump, who does not have a track record of telling the truth. He even said that Soleimani was responsible for millions of deaths. He did not even have the decency to tell his mate Johnson what he was going to do and we have troops out there. This is the same President who threw the Kurds to the Turkish government despite their losses in fighting with the Americans.

IR80 wrote: meamwhile I am sure Jeremy has an invite to pay his condolansces...https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-50986185 What are you talking about even the Americans are questioning the validity of his actions. The problem is that just saying we had information with Trump, who does not have a track record of telling the truth. He even said that Soleimani was responsible for millions of deaths. He did not even have the decency to tell his mate Johnson what he was going to do and we have troops out there. This is the same President who threw the Kurds to the Turkish government despite their losses in fighting with the Americans.

Re: Man of the People : Sat Jan 04, 2020 1:30 pm  

Mild Rover wrote:

You do know that Blair and Campbell went to Oxford and Cambridge, respectively? Blakely went to Oxford, as well.

What saddens me about ‘young’ Oxbridge types like Johnson and Cameron, who are both about a decade older than me, is that they’ve somehow convinced people like you that they are better than you.

I never said they were better than me - I said they are better educated, more intelligent and more confident - my kids are far better educated than I am - they all went to university I didn't. One thing I do have is I have never worked for anybody else I plough my own furrow - I live and die by the decision I make and I like it that way just fine.

Re: Man of the People : Sat Jan 04, 2020 1:43 pm  

Mild Rover wrote:

You do know that Blair and Campbell went to Oxford and Cambridge, respectively? Blakely went to Oxford, as well.

What saddens me about ‘young’ Oxbridge types like Johnson and Cameron, who are both about a decade older than me, is that they’ve somehow convinced people like you that they are better than you.

I do, which shows that arrogance has nothing to do being from the Bullingdon set - quite the opposite - perhaps we are getting to the root your dislike for these types.

[Mild Rover]

Re: Man of the People : Sat Jan 04, 2020 2:38 pm  

Sal Paradise wrote:

I do, which shows that arrogance has nothing to do being from the Bullingdon set - quite the opposite - perhaps we are getting to the root your dislike for these types.

That they were part of the Bullingdon set? Aye, I got to the bottom of that a while ago, and thought i’d left some pretty obvious clues.

While arrogance isn’t unique to members of the Bullingdon club, it’s a big leap to them being unrelated.

I agree with the chap who described it as ‘shameful’ and an example of ‘arrogance’. Although, of course, he is not renowned for his authenticity or honesty anymore than he is for his decency or humility in later life.

Arrogance is an interesting trait, I think, in that it can come from opposite ends of the confidence spectrum. Cameron’s is the natural arrogance of the privileged insider, who has never needed to question the order of things. Johnson’s is defensive, built as protective shell. The extremity of his adopted establishment Englishness is a shield and reaction against his status as a relative outsider. One of the great mysteries is the extent to which the original person still exists and has control within the created persona. It’s performance art at its most extreme, in a way, but with real-world consequences now. Is there something compelling and relatable about it, in a way that there isn’t for Cameron or Blair? Or is it repellently empty?

Re: Man of the People : Sat Jan 04, 2020 4:50 pm  

I have no problem with elite academic institutions, they should be encouraged and given proper funding by government. The fact that the UK has some of the best academic institutions in the world is one thing we should be building on and tapping in to their expertise.

However, there is a massive difference between being intelligent and being an expert in a field. Having an undergraduate degree from Oxbridge is a marker of intelligence but not expertise. To get one you need to be bright enough to get straight As at A-level, then cope with a system of tutorials and one essay/assignment per week, per subject (instead of one per term at other places) which is then picked apart by an academic. Then at the end there's an assessment system heavily weighted towards final exams so you'd need to be good at revising huge volumes of material and performing in an intense window of exams. Anyone who comes out of Oxbridge with a good standard degree has to have a high-functioning intellect, be able to cope under pressure, and be able to defend their ideas to an expert in a debate. So employers use an Oxbridge degree as a signal of being the kind of person suited to the demands of training to be a lawyer or working in investment banking etc.

BUT....having an undergraduate degree, even from Oxbridge, is no where near being an expert on a subject. Their curriculum might cover greater breadth than other places but still, an undergrad degree just scratches the surface of any field. People who go on to Masters degrees, PhDs, publish research, face a brutal world of knock-backs in peer review that gives them a humility that they realise just how vast their subject is and how little even the best professors know about it.

There's a problem regarding Oxbridge grads which I think is specific to government/public policy. Typically an Oxbridge grad has been a high flier through their school/sixth form/uni career, they've had parents and teachers telling them how good they are, always getting the top marks etc. They know they are bright and they have learned certain ways to deal with the challenges they have faced - late night essay crisis, take coffee and red bull, get a load of books out of the library, and they will be able to put together something credible and they're quick thinkers in a debate so can defend it in their tutorial. They have always been better than the majority of their peers, and they think they can solve any problem.

Then they are going to enter the 'real world' and be dealing with people with decades of experience, some of whom were the equivalent bright young Oxbridge grads in the 1980s, and have to deal with issues of more complexity than they have met before. It's the equivalent of being the young rugby player who has been the star at his school and junior club, gets signed on an Academy scholarship young, has a social media presence pimping himself out as the big star then makes his Super League debut and gets smashed about by the old pros.

In most of the high-paying professions that Oxbridge grads go in to: banking, financial services, law, there is a long path of professional training and working their way up the ranks, so they take their lumps as relative juniors early on and by the time they reach positions of influence they have become experts themselves. But in the 'government/public policy' circle: Whitehall, the world of Special Advisers and policy 'wonks', and think tankers, a bright Oxbridge grad that gets in will rapidly be put in a position of influence. Hence these fields are full of highly intelligent grads in their early to mid 20s who have done well in their school and university careers but are completely green to the real world, but think they know everything.

Sal P has mentioned a few times on here how Grace Blakeley irritates him. Well if you work in this field, you meet people like her all the time, in positions where they are the ones 'driving activity' or 'directing the ideas'. They'll be the super confident, sharply dressed 25 year old in the Treasury or DExEU who chairs a workshop that has been assembled of various experts to try and solve a super complex problem. This whizzkid will have spent 20 minutes before the session whipping together a set of powerpoint slides with some 'policy options' they've pulled together from the top of their head (most of which will betray absolutely no understanding of the real issues but will be 'blue sky thinking'). They'll spend most of the time allocated for the workshop talking themselves, giving a superficial run through of the background, then babble on about their own ideas, and once the actual experts start critiquing it and trying to talk about the real issues, that 25 year old will say 'sorry, I'm aware of the time here, we really must wrap up, so lets allocate out actions for who is going to work up the detail on each of my ideas....' and they will walk out of the meeting feeling super-satisfied with themselves (taking a selfie to upload to instagram in the process) while the actual experts walk out thinking, well the country is totally fecked if this is how decisions are made...

[Mild Rover]

Re: Man of the People : Sat Jan 04, 2020 6:51 pm  

sally cinnamon wrote:

I have no problem with elite academic institutions, ...

That’s interesting.

I think undergraduate science teaching might be a bit less different, compared to other Universities, than that. Being knowledgable and taking a considered approach is probably more valued than quick-thinking and being able to debate well. And being proficient at the bench, although it won’t affect your degree classification, is the same everywhere. I vaguely recall that they did a bigger research project and had fewer lectures in their final year than we did, which might help if they went on to a DPhil or PhD.

I don’t think they come out that different to science graduates elsewhere - I think they maybe go in more similar too. I’m not sure that science appeals that much to many of the kids who go to the top public schools - it probably wouldn’t deliver the standard of living they’re used to, and that leads to there being no established old boy network to exploit. There’s a patronage issue in science, it’s just more limited and self-contained.

I spent a year in Oxford in the 90s as part of my undergraduate degree, working in a Pharma research lab. They also had summer students from Oxford, and one of the technicians told me that the previous year one of them had asked her to make them a cup of tea. Apparently the technicians at Oxford did that. So that was definitely different!

One of the lads I shared a flat with was from Warrington, and he was in his second year of a biosciences degree, iirc. He was doing okay, but his feelings about having chosen Oxford were distinctly mixed. He was obviously from somewhere like Warrington and that, for example, rather limited his opportunities to form romantic relationships with fellow students. Or ‘get off with lasses’, as we probably said back then. He’d have probably been happier in Liverpool, Manchester or Leeds. One of the summer students who I spent most time with was originally from Sheffield and a bit more middle class. He’d enjoyed it more than my flat mate and was glad to have seen something different but admitted it could be a weird place.

Re: Man of the People : Sun Jan 05, 2020 1:34 am  

In undergraduate economics, the curriculum is fairly standardised across institutions because they all tend to use the same core textbooks which haven't changed much for years. There is some within-university and between-university differences in economics degrees. A lot of universities offer two types of degree (sometimes separated by the titles BA and BSc), one being a broad social science type degree which has only core economics modules and allows/encourages students to take subjects from other social sciences for their others, the other being a more restricted degree where they have more modules mandated, typically additional maths and stats/econometrics.

That first type of degree is like what Oxford offers with its PPE course. Cambridge basically just offers the second more mathematical type, which is similar to LSE, Warwick.

Within the economics field there is sometimes a slight snobbery against PPErs from Oxford, and towards the 'harder' more mathematical degrees. I think some of that is jealousy that PPE seems to be disproportionately represented at the higher tiers of government (for many decades now) and it can be seen as a bit of a 'blaggers degree' but on the other hand, John Maynard Keynes always argued that economists needed to study the other social sciences to be able to make economic decisions. Some of the more quantitative economists are a bit blinkered, they are can get overly sucked in to the elegance of their mathematical models and forget that these are underpinned by assumptions that may not be true. Modelling human behaviour is much more complex than modelling fluid dynamics or particle physics because of the vast difference in how every agent behaves. Andy Haldane (the Chief Economist at the Bank of England) has a great take on this - that traditional economics models are like hitting the back of a rocking horse. It rocks back and forth with successively diminishing 'shocks' until settling into an equilibrium. But really, economics is more like going in to a field of horses and smacking a live horse on the backside. It will bolt, and its bolting will trigger a response from the other horses, and if you want to model what will happen you need a deep understanding of the differences in personality of every horse, some are more jumpy than others, some will take their lead from what particular other horses do. Inevitably even the most complex mathematical models in economics involve some simplifying assumptions and the more you make the more you diverge from reality.

One strength the 'blaggers' have is they better respect the limitations of any economic models, and they see it more like foreign policy - understanding general principles and making best decisions under uncertainty, rather than the quants trying to model everything to the nth degree (a trap I fear Cummings will fall in to).

I do some careers work with school leavers sometimes and my standard line to them about which type of economics degree to follow is: if you just like economics and want to learn about how the world works and not pursue further study, go for the broader social sciencey type course. If you want to do an MSc or further research, you're better doing the more maths / econometrics heavy course at undergrad as that will cover some material you will be glad you aren't meeting for the first time on a Masters degree when the pace is uncomfortably fast.

Re: Man of the People : Mon Jan 06, 2020 9:30 am  

sally cinnamon wrote:

I have no problem with elite academic institutions, they should be encouraged and given proper funding by government. The fact that the UK has some of the best academic institutions in the world is one thing we should be building on and tapping in to their expertise.

However, there is a massive difference between being intelligent and being an expert in a field. Having an undergraduate degree from Oxbridge is a marker of intelligence but not expertise. To get one you need to be bright enough to get straight As at A-level, then cope with a system of tutorials and one essay/assignment per week, per subject (instead of one per term at other places) which is then picked apart by an academic. Then at the end there's an assessment system heavily weighted towards final exams so you'd need to be good at revising huge volumes of material and performing in an intense window of exams. Anyone who comes out of Oxbridge with a good standard degree has to have a high-functioning intellect, be able to cope under pressure, and be able to defend their ideas to an expert in a debate. So employers use an Oxbridge degree as a signal of being the kind of person suited to the demands of training to be a lawyer or working in investment banking etc.

BUT....having an undergraduate degree, even from Oxbridge, is no where near being an expert on a subject. Their curriculum might cover greater breadth than other places but still, an undergrad degree just scratches the surface of any field. People who go on to Masters degrees, PhDs, publish research, face a brutal world of knock-backs in peer review that gives them a humility that they realise just how vast their subject is and how little even the best professors know about it.

There's a problem regarding Oxbridge grads which I think is specific to government/public policy. Typically an Oxbridge grad has been a high flier through their school/sixth form/uni career, they've had parents and teachers telling them how good they are, always getting the top marks etc. They know they are bright and they have learned certain ways to deal with the challenges they have faced - late night essay crisis, take coffee and red bull, get a load of books out of the library, and they will be able to put together something credible and they're quick thinkers in a debate so can defend it in their tutorial. They have always been better than the majority of their peers, and they think they can solve any problem.

Then they are going to enter the 'real world' and be dealing with people with decades of experience, some of whom were the equivalent bright young Oxbridge grads in the 1980s, and have to deal with issues of more complexity than they have met before. It's the equivalent of being the young rugby player who has been the star at his school and junior club, gets signed on an Academy scholarship young, has a social media presence pimping himself out as the big star then makes his Super League debut and gets smashed about by the old pros.

In most of the high-paying professions that Oxbridge grads go in to: banking, financial services, law, there is a long path of professional training and working their way up the ranks, so they take their lumps as relative juniors early on and by the time they reach positions of influence they have become experts themselves. But in the 'government/public policy' circle: Whitehall, the world of Special Advisers and policy 'wonks', and think tankers, a bright Oxbridge grad that gets in will rapidly be put in a position of influence. Hence these fields are full of highly intelligent grads in their early to mid 20s who have done well in their school and university careers but are completely green to the real world, but think they know everything.

Sal P has mentioned a few times on here how Grace Blakeley irritates him. Well if you work in this field, you meet people like her all the time, in positions where they are the ones 'driving activity' or 'directing the ideas'. They'll be the super confident, sharply dressed 25 year old in the Treasury or DExEU who chairs a workshop that has been assembled of various experts to try and solve a super complex problem. This whizzkid will have spent 20 minutes before the session whipping together a set of powerpoint slides with some 'policy options' they've pulled together from the top of their head (most of which will betray absolutely no understanding of the real issues but will be 'blue sky thinking'). They'll spend most of the time allocated for the workshop talking themselves, giving a superficial run through of the background, then babble on about their own ideas, and once the actual experts start critiquing it and trying to talk about the real issues, that 25 year old will say 'sorry, I'm aware of the time here, we really must wrap up, so lets allocate out actions for who is going to work up the detail on each of my ideas....' and they will walk out of the meeting feeling super-satisfied with themselves (taking a selfie to upload to instagram in the process) while the actual experts walk out thinking, well the country is totally fecked if this is how decisions are made...

All good comments - on Grace Blakeley and her ilk e.g. Owen Jones Ash Sakar - these people don't have jobs where they actually contribute anything other than agitation. All three work as journalists they don't work at the coal face where decisions are actually made - their arrogance and perpensity to look down on everyone. This is the case with a lot of graduates who work in quangos and non-productive civil service jobs.

Out in the real world - as you pointed out - you have to earn your status and that takes time. Business is structured so if you are going to bet the farm that decision is made at the correct level with the appropriate consequences if it doesn't go well. Not a chance that say Sainsbury's decision to merge with Asda would have been made a 25 year rookie.

One of the best bits of business is working with and developing raw talent - giving them a framework by which they can deliver their ideas and energy. There is no substitute for experience but no matter how long you have been doing stuff you don't have all the answers - new ideas are the lifeblood of competitive advantage - a blend is needed between experience and youthful energy/ideas

Re: Man of the People : Mon Jan 06, 2020 9:48 am  

sally cinnamon wrote:

Some of the more quantitative economists are a bit blinkered, they are can get overly sucked in to the elegance of their mathematical models and forget that these are underpinned by assumptions that may not be true. Modelling human behaviour is much more complex than modelling fluid dynamics or particle physics because of the vast difference in how every agent behaves.

My son is in the final year of a Business Economics degree at Leeds; he often refers to the vast difference in approach of his various lecturers - some of whom he finds frustratingly married to the mathematical models, which he has decided for himself, I guess as he's gained more insight, won't work in the 'real world.' He feels most affinity with a lecturer who came late to the role after many years of working outside of education, than he does with the variously decorated PhD's, who love their subject as a purely academic endeavour.

I'm still not sure what he's going to do with his degree - and he could well be wrong in all his assumptions - but your post resonated with my conversations with him; which are becomingly increasingly difficult to follow, due to all his fancy university book learning.

Re: Man of the People : Mon Jan 06, 2020 11:46 am  

bren2k wrote:

My son is in the final year of a Business Economics degree at Leeds; he often refers to the vast difference in approach of his various lecturers - some of whom he finds frustratingly married to the mathematical models, which he has decided for himself, I guess as he's gained more insight, won't work in the 'real world.' He feels most affinity with a lecturer who came late to the role after many years of working outside of education, than he does with the variously decorated PhD's, who love their subject as a purely academic endeavour.

I'm still not sure what he's going to do with his degree - and he could well be wrong in all his assumptions - but your post resonated with my conversations with him; which are becomingly increasingly difficult to follow, due to all his fancy university book learning.

This is very typical of the graduates I get in my business - its marrying the theory with possible. What I find - I was guilty of it too - we invest huge amounts of money in capital projects based on a theory but seldom do we test whether the theory was robust and the investment delivered what it should. These days this is one of the first things I get graduates to do - post investment appraisal. The projects have several inputs that make them work e.g. increased productivity, employee numbers, utilization, opportunity cost etc. I get them all to appraise the same project that way I get an understanding of where they are, what interests them and their thought process. It helps in the words of Jim Collins - get the right people on the bus in the right seats.

I am currently reading a book by Ray Dalio - he is a very interesting guy - one of his important points is similar to mine - mine is "business is a game played by people" its the quality of the people you have in your organisation that makes the difference. His is about relationships - no amount of money can buy a good personal relationship