Economics, generational conflict, pop music & TV.  You can’t accuse me of not being eclectic.  So here is my contribution to baking, the new rock’n’roll.  It’s a recipe for eight brown rolls taken from a pack of Allinson’s Seed and Grain White Strong Flour, and it works.

Ingredients:

500g Allinson Seed & Grain Flour

7g Easy Bake Yeast (i.e. 1.5 teaspoons)

300ml Pale Ale or Stout

15ml Sunflower oil

I tbsp treacle

I tsp salt.

Here’s what you do.

1. Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. Stir in the sunflower oil and then the yeast (important to add the yeast before the liquid – but not disastrous)
2. Make a well in the centre of the flour mix, add the beer and treacle and mix together until it makes a soft dough. Slowly add small amounts of extra flour or water if you think it’s becoming too thick/wet.
3. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured worktop and knead until smooth and elastic
4. Divide it into eight equal pieces and make into round rolls. Place on a lightly oiled baking tray, and cover with cling film enough to keep out the air but not enough to push down on the rolls when they rise.
5. Put them in a warm place until they rise to double their size (this is called proving)
6. Preheat the oven to 220 degrees C (fan 200)
7. Place rolls in the centre of the oven for ten minutes. Turn the oven down to 200 (fan 180) and give it another ten minutes until the rolls have risen, are golden brown and sound hollow when you tap the bottom

This will all take about an hour plus the time for proving – maybe another forty minutes to an hour.  They are delicious – ideal for ploughman’s lunch, or even eggs Benedict.  The flour comes in 1kg packs, and lasts months, so there is enough to make two batches.  I predict, however, you will not wait four months before making your second batch.

Back to controversy soon, and there’s plenty of it.  The inter-generational spat has broken out again, and the productivity problem needs my attention.  Then there’s the abuse of capitalism.  So much to say, so little time.

It’s a Monday afternoon, and you are at a loose end.  So make yourself a mug of coffee, and settle down in front of the TV for some entertainment.  Start off at 3.15 with Perfection on BBC1, then when that ends at 4.00, switch over to The Tipping Point on ITV. That will take you through to 5.00, and you’ll have a fifteen minute wait until Pointless starts.  That will take you round to 6.00, when you can avoid all that nasty stuff on the BBC News by flicking over to BBC2 to see the Eggheads in action.  Phew, time for a break and a light snack, a tea interval like they have in Test Matches.  But make sure you are back in your chair for 8.00, when University Challenge starts, and when that stops change channels quickly so as not to lose a second of the delicious Only Connect.  At the end of that ?  Well, settle back and ‘well done to all of you at home’.  You have just survived four hours of interrogation,  more if you took in Classic Mastermind at 1.00 and The Weakest Link at 1.30.

What is so attractive about quizzes, and why are there so many on television ?  I can see the supply side reasons – they must be pretty cheap to make – one set for years, no location shooting, no expensive actors or (less expensive) script writers.  But there must also be a demand side reason – the shows would not be programmed unless there was a substantial audience out there.  What do they see in them, and what should be our attitude to the quiz industry ?

One factor must be a sense of identification – seeing people you like succeed, or (less praiseworthy) those you dislike lose.  That must be the reason for the desultory introductions at the start of each show – “so where do you come from ?  What do you do ? And how do you spend your leisure time ?”.  The sense of identification is strengthened, I guess, by the fact that the contestants’ default answer is support for a football team – “For my sins (horrible phrase) I support Ipswich Town/Swindon/Blackpool”.  The sense of identification is helped by the way most quizzes now have multiple choice questions, usually with only three options: and one of them is usually nonsensical.  This allows a much wider range of people to quiz along with the contestants.  It also contrasts starkly with my favourite French quiz Questions pour Un Champion, where no such help is given: you either know, or (under competitive time pressure) you don’t.

There could also be the reverse of identification – realizing that you know something that the contestants do not, and being able to feel a sense of superiority as you explode “why do they let these idiots on television ?”.  A brief look at Private Eye’s Dumb Britain will give you a few wonderful wrong answers, and there are more every week.  I can forgive someone not knowing that Portsmouth hosts the Spinnaker Tower, but thinking that it hosts the Mary Celeste is a little harder to pass.  Just yesterday we had a contestant who placed Boris Johnson in the last Labour Cabinet.  Hmmm.  Having said that, many of the apparent bloopers are generational.  There is really no reason for a teenager in University Challenge to know who was in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, thirty years before they were born.  It is the equivalent of asking me who was in Bonar Law’s cabinet: I don’t know, and I am a politics nerd.

Is there a more worthy reason for the success of quizzes – perhaps, the idea that we value knowledge and learning and want to see it succeed ?  This rests a little on whether we see the sort of general knowledge that quizzes need as part of our cultural heritage or important to the understanding of science or politics.  Often, there isn’t.  If you understand American history you will know who was President during the Civil War; you need to know about the periodic table to understand chemistry.  But such questions are the minority.  There is no value knowing how far horses run in the Derby, or the most popular Steve McQueen film.  I would argue that, whilst reading or art appreciation are important for a rounded human being, this doesn’t give any particular importance to knowing who won the Booker or Turner Prizes in a particular year.

I used to be a member of a pub quiz team.  Indeed, I was a semi-finalist in Brain of Britain many years ago[1].  I reckon you can divide keen quizzers into two categories – those who like to show off their general knowledge, and obsessives who like winning and are prepared to put in the hard graft learning lists of Oscar winners and Austrian monarchs that makes that more likely.  I will now avoid the attentions of my learned friend by suggesting which members of the “Eggheads” fall into each category.  Many keen quizzers can tell you which is the longest, or shortest play by Shakespeare, and which one has a character run off chased by a bear, but most would themselves run in terror from actually attending a performance.

[1] When I took over a troubled college, the local council included this information in its PR handout, prompting a member of staff to ask why they hadn’t been sent someone who could get to the final.

The names of this year’s Nobel Prize winners have been released over the past few weeks.  This is the real celebrity news, naming people that you either have never hear of, or have heard of without being quite clear what it is they have done (like Higgs).   To my shame, I had never heard of the magnificent Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, winners of this year’s Peace Prize.

As a former economics teacher I should really be giving you guidance on the winners of the Economics Prize.  It says something for the state of modern economics that the prize is being shared by three people who propose opposing theories.  As John Kay said in the Financial Times, “it is like awarding the physics prize jointly to Ptolemy for his theory that the Earth is the centre of the universe, and to Copernicus for showing it is not”.

Eugene Fama is known for the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which tells us that free markets accurately price assets by incorporating all public knowledge.  This suggests that, when investing in the Stock Market, you are best to invest in a tracker fund that simply replicates the market, rather than an actively managed fund where investment managers choose promising stocks (and try to second guess the real value of assets).  In fact, this turns out to be pretty accurate – actively managed funds usually do worse than the stock market average, and charge you extra for the service.  As an outsider, however, you may think feel the idea that market prices are always right  a curious theory to hold : if it were true, no-one would ever (non-corruptly) make money out of stock market speculation, and commodity bubbles would never happen.  In fact, Fama denies that bubbles happen, telling his interviewer in the New Yorker that the word is meaningless .

On the other hand, one of the other winners, Robert J. Shiller (so near to being Bob Shilling – what a great name that would be for an economist) not only says bubbles can happen, he predicted the US housing crash.  Where should we go in all this ?  I’m not sure.  I respect people who say that the EMH may not be great, but it is useful and the best we have got.  I remain with deep suspicions about the enthusiasm shown towards a theory that says markets are just great, and (by implication) governments should leave them alone.  I remember that Joan Robinson, herself no mean economist, said that economics has two functions. One is to explain the behaviour of the economy, the other was to supply an ideology for the ruling class.

The best explanation for laymen I have found – and that, now, includes me, I’m afraid, is to be found in a blog by John Kay.  It’s a bit of a long haul, but you may be amused by his discussion of the use of evidence in economics, and his revelation of the number of assumptions that have to be made to find that the EMH (and a lot else in market economics) is true.

The Republicans in the US Congress are now saying the reason they are paralysing government is to stop Chinese having power over the USA by buying its bonds (and funding the deficit).  This was to be expected.  The right rarely say “we want to reduce taxes on the rich because we have always wanted to hang on to all the money we can” or “we should cut welfare because helping the poor is a stupid idea” or  “we want to reduce employment rights because we think bosses should have a free hand”.  What they say is “we are so worried about the national debt that we regrettably (holds onion under eyes) have to cut welfare” or “to make the economy competitive, we need to cut taxation on the wealth creators”.  Now the false alarm about the US deficit – it is falling, and it was not a problem – has been called, an alternative enemy has to be found, and the Chinese are an ideal target.  “There’s this nation, billions of ‘em, they look really foreign, and despite productivity less than 20% of US levels, they plan to come and eat your breakfast.  And they will unless we cut the debt, slash welfare and reduce the rights of working people”.

For anyone seduced by this stuff, see Ben Chu’s recent articles as a welcome rebuttal.

Oh, and if you want a bit of “O” level economics, we don’t get poorer if other nations get richer.  If we did, we would be poorer than we were in 1900, and we aren’t.  The only thing that can make us poorer is bad economic policies, like we have at the moment.  I’m half way through a longer piece on the UK productivity problem, what it is and why it matters more than the national debt or immigrants or much else, but this post will cover things until I have the time to finish that.

I caught the end of a nightmare discussion on TV last night, in which some employers’ representative was justifying paying young people nothing to work on the grounds that ‘many young people lack the skills to be effective workers’ and that the employer was doing a good thing providing useful work experience.

It’s quite hard to know where to start with the current nonsense about unemployment and young people.  I recognise that it is part of the defence mechanism for those who still believe in the neo-liberal view of the world – now that we have seen markets do not solve everything, and capitalism cocks up the economy pretty regularly, and the labour market above all does not clear, they need to find alternative excuses that blame the victims.  So out comes the poison: the poor go to food banks because they are feckless, living on benefits is a lifestyle choice, the young lack jobs because they are gormless.

Good sense will prevail one day.  Let’s begin by saying that unemployment for young people – as for other people – fluctuates with the economy.  Teenagers may leave school with the mathematical genius of Steven Hawking and the literacy of J. K. Rowling, but if there are no bloody jobs, they are unlikely to be employed.  Correction – the very best school and university graduates may get a job, but this does not mean the others lack work skills.  It means there are not enough vacancies.   I never met anyone who was unemployed until my twenties. This was not because we all had whizzo vocational skills.  It was because there were plenty of jobs.  Nationally unemployment was around 300,000 (a tenth of today’s real total) and concentrated in ‘depressed regions’.  In the South East where I lived, careers guidance for young people consisted of finding a job, then (if you didn’t like it) giving it up and trying another.

It really isn’t about youngsters lacking skills or motivation, or all wanting to be X Factor stars.  The youngsters I meet seem lively, motivated, realistic, keen to learn skills and comfortable with new technologies.  I grew up in London in the 1960s, and the skills of young people were, by any measure, decisively worse than they are today.  The numbers leaving school without qualifications (many of them from grammar schools) was vast, and pass rates for ‘O’ levels – the equivalent of grade C GCSE – were low.  Some secondary modern schools – and remember, that is where most students went – did not enter students for examinations at all.  Concern about adult literacy today must have some reflection on school standards then, don’t you think ?  Today’s school and college leavers are better qualified than any previous generation.

it could be argued, I guess, that certificates don’t make you employable. May be true, but unlikely. And if ministers truly believe that the most qualified cohort of young people in our nation’s history are poorly equipped for work, maybe they might look at the school curriculum, league tables, the inspection and examination system that they have designed, and which they insist this generation has to endure. The education and skills they have are the ones you insist they need, aren’t they ?  And perhaps they might remember that they abolished EMA grants for youngsters attending vocational courses a couple of years ago, a move that even government advisers describe as a ‘very bad mistake’.

It is convenient for employers to have ‘interns’ that earn no money, which has the knock-on effect that those who do not have rich parents who can subsidise them stand little chance of a desirable professional job.  It is nice for them to provide ‘zero hours’ contracts that are alleged to offer flexibility but in fact exploit workers.  The government can breathe easy when a million youngsters are idle if they can convince people that these are unemployable oafs.  Rather than pay attention to the real problems of the labour market, and the crisis of unemployment, it is easier to create a smoke screen of nonsense – about feckless youngsters or unworldly graduates – to justify the sort of bad behaviour that employers could not sustain in a boom.

What we need is (a) an economic recovery led by projects that will create useful jobs and (b) a supportive training system that links colleges and employers around real apprenticeships and vocational opportunities.  The OECD has just reported that this is absolutely what we don’t have.  Even Thatcher created YTS schemes that tried to link jobless youngsters with job experience and employers.  Yes, no misprint – even Thatcher.  Blaming young people for coming onto the labour market just after bankers have cocked up the economy and destroyed their jobs is easier than working to end the problem, but it is repulsive, and those engaging in it – people who eased into their jobs when these challenges were not around – should be ashamed.

(It has just occurred to me that the people who come out with this pernicious guff are the same ones who justify cuts in technical education and social services to reduce the national debt “so we do not leave economic difficulties to the next generation”.  The economic difficulty caused by not having a job for years is, it seems, a second order problem.  Like the economic difficulties in having inadequate housing, outdated transport, laboratories, schools and hospitals.  You couldn’t, as they say, make it up.)

The quiz show Pointless had a round today in which contestants had to say which singers (I cannot bring myself to say ‘artists’ – grumpiness has its standards) released the following songs:

Bye Bye Baby                                                                                   1975

Baby                                                                                                  2010

Love to Love You Baby                                                                   1976

Plug-in Baby                                                                                     2001

I Got You Babe                                                                                1965

Hey Baby                                                                                          1962

Ice Ice Baby                                                                                      1990

Baby Come Back                                                                             1968

Baby Love                                                                                        1964

Always Be My Baby                                                                        1996

Your Baby Ain’t Your Baby Any More                                         1974

Baby One More Time                                                                     1999

Babe                                                                                                  1993

Be My Baby                                                                                      1963

Decent question, and one that stretched across the generations.  I did OK, but then, I am a trivial person.  But now, here’s a thing.  I have never heard anyone refer to their inamorata as ‘baby’.  Never.  I’ve lived in the north, Midlands and in London, Yorkshire and Lancashire.  I’ve worked with colleagues with a variety of ethnicities, genders, sexuality, and a range of ages.   It may be I don’t eavesdrop enough, though my wife would contest that.  Darling, honey, sweetheart, yep, all that, honeybun too, but never ever have I heard a British person call their partner ‘baby’.  Have you ?

In one of the more interesting periods of my life, I did some part-time broadcasting for a commercial radio station: wonderful Radio Tees (as the jingle said, “257 and 95 VHF, in stereo, stereo, stereo”).  I stood in now and again for late-night DJs who were on leave, and I still have one tape, in which I try to sound more like Bob Harris than Bob Harris.  However, my main job was to be part of a weekly 45 minute talk/arts programme – an arts programme on a commercial station, that’s how long ago it was.  Another indication of how long ago it was can be found in my being given the job of doing Agatha Christie’s obituary (yep, January 1976).

I remember talking about the clunky prose, and the outdated social attitudes (the motivation for one murder was to avoid a family discovering that the woman their son was about to marry had a black ancestor), but also noting that the books seemed to have covered every single possibility of murder. In Murder on the Orient Express, of course, everyone did it.  In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the narrator did it.  One ‘victim’ was in fact the murderer.  In another book, no-one did it, as the ‘victim’ set up a suicide to look like murder.  And so on.  As the writing went on, the plots became every more tortuous, until you had to assume that the Irish housemaid was bound to be someone’s illegitimate daughter.

What I didn’t notice at the time has been brought home whilst looking at some of the David Suchet versions that are endlessly repeated on ITV4 (sponsored by Viking Cruises – whose adverts pose the question as to whether they ever go anywhere but Budapest). This is that her characters will do anything to avoid doing a job.  There are some exceptions, but they prove the rule in this sense – that when the books have the occasional corrupt banker or irascible industrialist, or doctor, they are usually incompetent or failing, at best irascible, at worst evil or corrupt.   The idea that no-one who does a useful job ever appears to be pleasant might be significant.

The plots usually centre on contested wills.  It appears that the characters desperately need the money that the ratty industrialist or dotty aunt is leaving. The idea that they might tell their impossible relative to get lost, and go off to become a lawyer or a teacher, farmer or bank clerk or anything at all, seems not to be considered.  It was once said that the plots of most Victorian novels would collapse with the presence of antibiotics and a decent divorce law.  Ms Christie’s would have a hard time creating stories with today’s middle class, made up of people who went to college and got a job.

Now, the other topic that cropped up whilst I was away and making plum jam was the whole farrago of secrecy/privacy/Wikileaks/government scrutiny of e-mails/Edward Snowden, NSA and Moscow Airport.  Then there was the detention of the partner of the Guardian journalist who broke a lot of the Wikileaks story at Heathrow airport.

Sorry, folks, but I can’t help you here.  You must tell me what I should think about this.  In what way is a journalist/whistle-blower revealing the names and activities of government agents and agencies different from what Kim Philby, Burgess and Maclean got up to in the 1940s and 50s ?  We now know that led to the torture and death of western agents in the Soviet system.  I recall outraged letters to the press pointing out that Bradley/Chelsea Manning got a longer sentence for revealing US security information than the guards at Abu Ghraib prison did for humiliating and abusing their charges.  But, appalling as their conduct was, it was surely less serious than revealing nationally sensitive secrets, or placing at risk the lives of those working on our behalf in murderous environments.

Help me here.   Is the position that any piece of personal information is secret and should not be revealed, whereas any piece of government information can properly be leaked by a ‘whistle-blower’ ?   If it isn’t, and the world requires a more subtle and nuanced position, where do we draw the line ?  And if we do draw a line, doesn’t it mean that it is OK for government agencies to intercept some of our stuff, and that some people who reveal security sensitive information should be prosecuted ?

Syria has provided the main news point this week, with the UK House of Commons voting not to be involved in air strikes against the Syrian regime.  In this decision, MPs reflected UK public opinion, where only 19% (Telegraph) or 29% (Independent) believe we should support military action (and the backward regret about Iraq).   Some of the parliamentary and international debate – whether from MPs (including Ed Miliband) or from Vladimir Putin – is about being sure that the Syrian regime is behind chemical attacks.  Let’s wait to see what UN inspectors say, is the cry.  This strikes me as fudging the issue, and is not what lies behind the reservations expressed by upwards of two-thirds of the UK population.  I don’t think Mr Average in Swindon or Stockbridge thinks we should hold back because there’s a strong chance that someone else committed the latest atrocity.  They think (if they are like me) that it is pretty certain the regime is behind the chemical attack on civilians.  What we don’t see is what a drone attack or a hail of Tomahawks does to improve the situation; least of all, what would be the consequence of a land invasion except a muddled withdrawal in ten years time, with Arab public opinion blaming  ‘crusaders’ and ‘Zionists’ for the resultant chaos.  We are told by enthusiasts and drum-beaters (see David Aaronovitch in the Times) that Syria is not like Iraq, and parliamentary debate should not be overshadowed by the ghosts of the past.  But there is one way it is very like Iraq, which is that there seems to be no coherent plan to get a better solution.  Some things in life are just a mess, and creating more mess does not seem to be an improvement.

Brecht wrote a play – “The Good Woman of Szechwan” – where the heroine tries to use a gift from the Gods to help everybody in a poor town and resolve their problems.  Pretty soon she is penniless and exploited, and discovers that “what is needed is a blanket ten thousand feet wide, to cover the city”.   There is no such thing of course.  Plot spoiler – she has to invent a wicked uncle to tell those wanting more money and more help from her to go away.  The world is like that: it isn’t possible to fix everything.  Those of us who oppose action in Syria don’t support Assad – and I suspect those columnists who speak of ‘helping the regime’ know we don’t.  But neither do we support some of the repulsive ‘rebels’ who execute prisoners and eat their body parts.  We are not particularly keen to make debating points about the far greater fatalities in Darfur or the Congo (or chemical attacks by Saddam when he was our boy) that attracted little interest or proposals for intervention.  We just have the experiences of Somalia and Afghanistan and Iraq to go on to see that meddling might be an expensive way to make matters worse, and the view of Libya and Iran and Egypt to know that regime change is not always successful.

Footnote: a week or so ago, my line was to threaten the Tomahawks and drones unless specific and deliverable assurance were received – no chemical weapons, open access for humanitarian aid organisations, immediate cooperation with International War Crimes investigators.  It looks as if we might be crawling towards some version of this, with the closure of all chemical stockpiles.  War may be the continuation of diplomacy by other means, but diplomacy should be the replacement of war by other means.

One last word on the party conferences, and Cameron’s appalling attempt to blame unemployed young people for their position.  In 2002 there were 200,000 unemployed young people, mostly 18/25 year olds.  There are now over 1m, the worst position in 20 years.  We therefore have other a sudden and unexplained quintupling of the idleness of young people, or the result of an economic recession.

In the past, governments – even Thatcher’s, for heaven’s sake – have regarded youth unemployment as a national emergency and put in place training programmes and subsidised work placements.   Our current masters, having vandalized the economy, more than doubled university fees and abolished Education Maintenance Allowances, find it easier to attack the victims of their policy.  This is just loathsome.