Month: March 2005

“David Copperfield” (a policeman) explains the purpose of Schools in our society.

I’ve been reading the Equal Opportunities Commission’s report on young people entering jobs.

One finding highlighted in the press release:

67% of women, didn’t know when they chose their career, about the often lower pay for work mostly done by women and of these two thirds of young women said they would have considered a wider range of career options had they known.

In the general spirit of making up “just so stories”, without evidence, to explain why men and women might behave differently (not being an academic, I can participate in this diverting pastime), I have a new one:

Children are generally presented with a mass of propaganda to the effect that making money is nasty, and nice people aren’t concerned about such things. (I still wince at the memory of Roger Hargreaves’ “Roundy and Squarey”). My prejudice leads me to suspect that girls might be slightly more susceptible to this rubbish than boys, and that therefore boys would be more keen to identify and head for well-paid occupations than girls.

Just a thought. It would be interesting if the EOC, or whoever, were to ask a question along these lines in their next survey. My prejudices are all very well, but data would be preferable.

For the record, while I see no need to aim for exact equality of numbers of men and women in every occupation, and am suspicious of quangos like the EOC, they are clearly looking at a real problem. I am sitting here in a room with twenty-six other software developers, twenty-five of which are male, and we’re struggling to fill open positions…

(comments disabled on this post as having “Work” in the title seems to particularly attract spam)

According to page 14 of today’s Metro, transport tops weekly bills, with £60
spent per week on average.

That’s odd. If average income is £570, then on average we spend about £200 per week on government. That’s as much as on Transport, Recreation, Food and Housing put together. Since I suspect the ONS figures quoted actually include the VAT and other taxes on what we buy, the extent to which taxation dominates our household budgets is even more dramatic.

Tax tops weekly bills.

GMT. For about the tenth year, I am leaving my clocks well alone this weekend. There are defensible arguments for doing regular activities a bit earlier in summer, but changing the clocks twice a year just isn’t a sensible way of doing it. From an information systems point of view, it’s just bad data modelling. It would be much easier if we could assume that every day has 24 hours (give or take a second), that every day has a 1:30 am (and no day has two), and that clocks will run by themselves.

Most timetables get revised regularly anyway — train timetables, for example, usually change around the time of the clock shifts. Both at school and at one past job, we had summer timetables and winter timetables without causing any problems.

I don’t know what the average number of clocks per person is these days, but I don’t think it’s unusual to have one in every room, plus watches, cars, microwave ovens etc. etc. BST probably costs about 30-60 minutes of leisure time per person per year. Add about one programmer-day per medium sized business unit per year dealing with errors thrown up by the time shift. Add the cost of all the human errors introduced twice every year. Add the costs of those that need their timetables to stay regular, and therefore have to adjust them to compensate. (I wouldn’t like to be running an airline at this time of year). Compare to the benefits for people who would otherwise have to change their schedules to take advantage of the early mornings, but this way don’t.

If I were to pluck a figure out of the air, I’d say this insanity costs the country about a billion pounds a year. It’s going to get worse, not better. I don’t know how many people routinely have to know the time in more than one timezone, but it makes that much more difficult. Even if we bully the whole world to do the shift at the same date, half the world is still doing it the other way.

My refusal to change my clocks is a token resistance. What’s most frustrating is that most people agree it’s silly to do this, but nobody cares much. I try to keep the issue visible, to remind people what they’re losing.

All of the arguments in defense of the nonsense assume that people are totally incapable of noticing or adapting to the change of the seasons without the government tricking them into it. I have a higher opinion of my countrymen than that.

Update: via Stumbling and Mumbling, a study estimating the effect of clock changes on the equities market. I’m not really sure what to make of that — the author’s explanations are in terms of subjective effects on traders rather than effects on the actual companies being traded, so I wouldn’t count the devaluation detected as a “loss” per se. The author also mentions in passing increased accident rates following clock changes, which I hadn’t taken into consideration.

Speaking of subjective effects, I think that my habit of adjusting my timetable rather than my clocks helps me to adjust as regards sleep and so on. There’s no logical reason for that, but who knows what effect our belief as to what time it is affects our minds?

Also cited, an earlier item from Village Hampden. I’d meant to refer to that, but I couldn’t find it today. I see BST more as a symbol of government’s inflated self-importance than its tyranny — after all, legally everyone could do as I do and leave their clocks alone. It is worthwhile to demonstrate that the state doesn’t control the stars and the planets…

Update 2: Via the Risks Digest (in full, the Association for Computing Machinery Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems), Barclays’ cash machine network brought down for a day by the time change. Every spring and autumn brings similar news stories.

The blog Cabalamat Journal agrees with my take on public-sector waste.

It’s important to emphasise the dynamic aspect of this. When the state sets up an organisation, it can be very efficient. The NHS probably worked very well in the ’40s and ’50s. Stalin industrialised Russia into a superpower with efficiency equal to his ruthlessness, and indeed wartime Britain’s state-controlled economy was equally effective. As late as 1960, even Western politicians of both left and right believed that the communist system was more efficient than the market.

The problem with state control is not that it makes organisations inefficient. Organisations become inefficient naturally. The problem is that under state control there is no way to reverse that. If the NHS or the Inland Revenue could be made as efficient as they were fifty years ago, the 1980s USSR could have been made as efficient as it had been fifty years previously. There’s no mechanism to do the job, in either case. Unfortunately, most of the electorate believes that the clock can be turned back, to the relatively well-functioning public services of the 1960s. That model just wasn’t sustainable. It can work for a time in a crisis, such as 1940-45, but in the long run it is doomed. The efficient NHS is gone forever, and cannot be recovered. This is what Howard is too chicken to tell the electorate.

Here’s hoping for the next leader of the Conservative Party.

I would recommend Robert Skidelsky, The World After Communism, but it seems to be out of print.

Is the public sector hugely inefficient? Yes, the public sector is hugely inefficient. Why is it hugely inefficient? Because it is very large, and has been very large for a long time, which means the organisation has its own inertia beyond the control of those whose money it wastes. But what about large private-sector organisations, why don’t they get inefficient? They do, but once they get inefficient, they either subsidise their inefficiency from state support or monopoly rents, or else some asset stripper buys in and chops huge chunks off them until they’re small enough to be made efficient, or a “new broom” manager does the same thing to pre-empt the private-equity artists from doing the same thing.

Can taxpayer money be saved by cutting out waste? Yes, it can. Without cutting services? No, it can’t. The only way to cut out the waste is to cut whole organisations down to a size that can be controlled and made efficient.

Does that mean that every discussion of economic policy in the media is about as relevant to real life as Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing? Yes, it does.

Today’s statement of the bleeding obvious, brought to you by Anomaly UK.