Tyle Brule, writing in last Saturday's Financial Times reports seeing a number of people on holiday reading using iPads. (no doubt in rather up market surroundings). The problem is that an iPad is really difficult to read in direct sunlight, he observes, producing strange contortions as people look for ways to shade the screen. he reckons old fashioned literature on paper so much more convenient. I have two thoughts on this:- 1. It reminds one of how all these things are user specific. It would not be a problem for me as I cannot read in bright sunlight. I can only read a book or a magazine in shade anyway. So if I were an iPad user I would not notice..(I have a problem in my left eye; the iris does not work properly so glare always a huge issue for me) 2. A way of letting me read comfortably in bright sunlight would be prescription poloroid reading glasses. if an iPad screen could be devised that was both bright and emitted polarised light, then with the right glasses it could be easy to read, even in bright sunlight. Actually I do not like sitting in the sun.
Graduate Tax part two (part one is below)
How to implement it?
Round about 1977 Jonathan Haughton departed to do his PhD in economics at Harvard. I emerged clutching my philosophy degree, and having completed a year as a full time (sabbatical) student union officer at Trinity College. I then found myself under the regrettable necessity of making a living. Finding a post was made less stressful in ways I can only guess by the fact I was not in debt. Over the next few years I held a number of administrative posts in various colleges, both in England and both parts of Ireland. The topic of student finance would occasionally surface and I might mention the idea of a graduate tax, as a possible solution but it rarely sparked any interest. However early on I encountered a Professor of Economics visiting my institution, who over coffee expressed interest. As I had a copy of the original paper to hand I gave it to him. He returned it in true academic fashion having in effect marked it, pronouncing it an excellent undergraduate effort, and recommending, if I was still interested, that I read several of his books. He also mentioned it to a colleague, a visiting lecture in Finance, who it turned out had taken early retirement from being a senior person with the pension fund of the Government of Ontario.
The colleague told me how it could be made to work.
His essential insight was to realise that the graduate tax scheme in the paper was a pension scheme backwards. In a pension scheme you pay in over your working life, and are then at retirement, paid a pension for as long as you live.
Obviously people live for different periods of time so the amount paid out in pension varies. However if you have enough pensioners it all averages out. Those who live a long time are paid for by those who live a short time.
In the graduate tax you are paid an allowance for tuition fees and maintenance which varies as to amount per year (within known limits), for a period of years which varies between known limits. Three year degree in English cheapest, seven year medical course dearest. He proposed that the upfront cost would be met by setting up an independent Graduate Tax agency that would function much like a pension scheme. This agency would pay the fees for each eligible student and pay them their maintenance grant. For the first three years no graduate tax would be collected, then a trickle would start. The agency would therefore start off by running a deficit, this would be met by:-
1. The Government continuing to contribute what they were already putting in (Or in our current circumstances, no doubt, what they put in last year minus 5 per cent over four years).
2. Bonds being issued to meet the rest of the expenditure each year . They would be dated to be repaid in 40 years time, and auctioned off each year for the best price. To start with the interest would be paid by the funds coming from the Government, then the revenue from the tax would be significant. After a further while the tax revenue would be sufficient that the bonds could be managed using a "sinking fund".
As the scheme approached maturity the government contribution (providing the levy was set at the right rate) would wither away, and eventually the revenue coming in from the levy would balance expenditure.
Three points to note about this particular implementation:-
1. The levy collected over forty years. In many professional (i.e. Graduate grade) jobs income rises over the career, so the last few years could be really important to tax. and it allows for a lower percentage levy.
2. This scheme pays for the fees and maintenance without means test; but in many middle class families children would be getting the graduate tax agency payment at the same time as parents paid the levy!
3.The state must determine the level of tuition fees for different courses, and also determine the number of student places, as otherwise accurate calculations not possible. (The liabilities of the fund need to be fixed)
I forget his name I am afraid, but he did say that any civil servant with experience of pensions would come up with the same idea. No doubt Vince Cable has someone working on this as I write...
At the time what ensured that no one in the UK was interested in this sort of scheme was the continuance of the student grant system, which conferred on students, of whom I had been one, the advantages of the graduate tax without the levy. We could indeed have the cake and eat. There was the argument from social justice, but actually there were many other aspects of the system more regressive than student grants...
These days with a student loan system and a funding crisis for the universities thinking may change.
Today's news Coverage
(I have promised a part 2..... but pending that this is part 1.1 )
Today's coverage of Vince Cable's coverage of Graduate Tax reports that the NUS is in favour of a graduate tax, and indeed they are. Which is good news.
You can find their proposal here
I have only had a chance to glance at their detailed proposal, and will write a response to it when I get the chance. I agree with the principle of their scheme as far as it goes However they do not include student maitenance, they link it to an abolition of tuition fees, with the graduate tax ultimately funding financing of universities through grants, for some reason they limit the levy period to 20 years, and they do not really address the upfront funding problem, so I would have things to say.
The Russell Group appeared to be opposed, with their spokesman Wendy Piat using what seems to me to be frankly a straw man argument. She says that people in top Graduate Jobs could be paying 16,000 a year in graduate tax. if the levy were set, as the NUS propose at 2.5 per cent exactly what ARE these top graduate jobs, how many of them are there, and she is talking about a taxable income of about 300,000 pounds a year....
So the next question is how can my daughter get one?
Graduate Tax.
(part one)
Has its day come?
There are probably not many people who, hearing on the radio in the morning that Vince Cable is going to propose a Graduate tax, experienced nostalgia.
I have supported the idea of a Graduate Tax for years. Like all the good ideas I have had, I got this from someone else. When I was a student (at Trinity College, Dublin: 1971 -1975 or 76 -depends on definitions) one of my fellow students was Jonathan Haughton. He was studying economics. (Which I wasn't - I got to know him through student politics. I was for a while the student returning officer. This made me the resident geek who was able to count elections conducted according to the single transferable vote, and also made me a great spectator of the political process as , being the returning officer, I was barred from being a candidate in elections. Jonathan was elected President of the Students' Union in 1975 ) One of the pressing issues at the time (and is it not ever thus?) was student finance. In 1975/76 he brought forward an idea for funding students in the Republic of Ireland. He wrote a paper (I wonder does he still have a copy in his files?) in which he outlined a graduate tax scheme.
In a nutshell, the plan was that the costs of Higher Education, fees and maintenance would be paid for by an agency of the state, and that graduates would then pay a tax levy on their income for the rest of their working lives, which would go back to the state agency.
His scheme sought to solve three problems:-
1. To provide a source of funds, where no source currently existed.
The Irish Republic was a smaller, poorer economy than the UK. The only way in which the Republic could have a system as generous as the UK was to have some kind of additional levy. Increasing the level of income tax to pay for students was not an option, partly because personal tax was already very high (It was found out much later that this was partly because of a high level of tax evasion amongst the well heeled which shrank the tax base and so made matters even worse than they need be) and partly because of the social injustice involved in putting a tax burden on the low paid, when a lot of the proceeds would go to the already privileged middle class. Which brings me to 2.
2. To introduce greater fairness into the funding of Universities.
Irish Universities although charging tuition fees (In 1972 mine were 148 pounds a year, paid by the UK. ) were also subsidised by the state. So this was a subsidy you benefited from disproportionately if you got to university (And if you got to university you were probably not working class. ) and could foot the bills for fees and maintenance. I have come to think of this in shorthand as the "Covent Garden Problem". The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is a state subsidised Opera House. A seat there will often cost upwards of fifty pounds. To get the benefit of the subsidy one has to buy a seat....
Now of course Universities DO benefit the whole population. The easiest general benefit to demonstrate comes from medical schools.... So there is some justification for general support. On the other hand, in general, graduates do experience a higher level of income throughout their lives than they would have if they had not had a degree. Doctors a perfect example of this. So there is a "graduate premium." ( Vince Cable today said that the UK graduate premium is about 100 thousand pounds over a working life.)
3. To increase the level of resource going in to the Irish universities, which were then struggling to cope.
As they would be paid for through the graduate tax university fees could be significantly higher than their subsidised rate without causing a crisis either of affordability or social mobility.
Jonathan did try to promote the graduate tax during his year of elected student office, but got more or less nowhere. As I recall the three problems he had were:-
1. People who did not understand it, other than spotting the word tax.
2. Those who did understand it and realised the re-distributional effect and the reduction of middle class privilege implied. As it were, dearer opera tickets. So opposed it - as against their interests, narrowly conceived. When it comes to "enlightened self interest" people seem to be better on the self interest bit, and not so good on the enlightened. Those who opposed it often used a variation of the "straw man" argument. They misrepresented the proposal as something else, usually as a straight forward loan scheme, and then criticised loan schemes. When this misrepresentation was intentional, or when it was due to sloppy thinking on the part of opponents was not clear.
3. The third, and at the time, really fatal objection to the scheme arose partly out of the fact that the scheme was intended to greatly increase the expenditure on Higher Education in Ireland. This by providing maintenance grants where there were none, and also by paying higher fees so that the universities would have more money. All very well - in due course - but at the start there would have to be a big upfront payment before the graduate tax started to role in. There would have to have been a very large upfront increase in state spending on Higher Ed. This made the graduate tax look like something, which although a good idea would never actually come about as at any given time it would cost too much to start.
While I think Jonathan Haughton did manage to have a number of really interesting conversations with Irish Politicians, including to my certain knowledge Garret FitzGerald, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garret_FitzGerald ) he got essentially nowhere with the idea; it was the third objection that did it for it.
He finished his one year term as President of the Union, completed his degree and then went off to do a PhD at Harvard. We dropped out of touch, and I have no idea whether he remembers his scheme or whether he would still support it. Perhaps he would see it as a piece of juvenilia and not welcome my revival of his association with it. I wonder whether he will stumble across this on the Internet - no doubt, in due course this post will be picked up by google. If you want to read a bit more about graduate tax have a look at part two, above.
This is an interesting post I came across. While a lot of it American centred I think his speculation about the sort of thing that might become possible once iPad type devices, or even just iPads become very common intriguing.
It also indicates another use for posterous. When I come across something like this, all I have to do is tag it and send it to my posterous blog, and it will always be there for me to see again. Providing the link does not get taken down.
So to return to the question "why blog?" the usefullness of this particular post lies in its interest for me. Matters not whether anyone else is interested...
David Rothman on the iPad Stimulus Plan - Science and Tech - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/06/guest-post-david-rothman-on-the-ipad-stimulus-plan/58539/1/A really interesting article by Marcus Du Sautoy about eBooks. Follows on nicely from my first sighting of an iPad...
My first sight of an iPad was on Tuesday, 6 July, 2010. I was on the Northern Line going to Bank and I sat beside a guy who was using an iPad to read a graphic novel. Seemed perfectly serviceable for that, but I noticed that he had to be sitting down to use it. I suppose the design improvements for future up grades will be to make it lighter, more rugged, and with a higher resolution screen. It could, with cameras added, as in the new iPhone work as a video conference unit. I was interested to see that Amazon have released an iPhone/ iPad app which allows you to use the iPad as a kindle. Clearly Amazon are mainly interested in selling eBooks so dont care whether you use their reader or not.
Although in the first wave of people to use email, I have not blogged before now. I find that fact interesting. But will anyone else? And there surely, is part of the reason for the delay.. Why presume what I have to write is of interest to anyone? Except, perhaps, to me. If I want to monologue about those things which happen to interest me why dont I just do it quietly. Either by muttering to myself in the bath or if I must, keep a written journal. Why post it up here for anyone to read? But then perhaps no one will read it anyway; in which case it is no more self indulgent than a journal. Except that when what I write falls "stillborn from the internet" a certain humility born of a certain humiliation may be induced. After all there is just so MUCH stuff out there. But actually this is not a new problem. We already had it with books. Could someone have read all the books in the Library of Alexandria? There were between 400,000 and 700,000 volumes. (According to Wikipedia, so it must be true.) So thats a "no" then. And all of them hand-written. There can be no doubt that being a classicist would be a lot more challenging if the library had not been burnt.... And then Gutenberg comes along. And what opened? The floodgates.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_Revolution So the printing revolution, which has of course not stopped. (Cheaper printing, printing on demand) initiated the overload of print. And all on dead trees. I realised the connection between the book supply problem, and the blogosphere when I came across Gabriel Zaid's ( commendably short ) book "So many books". One of his arresting statistics is that a new book is now published every thirty seconds. Human beings are publishing vastly more than they could read. Given so many books, and the impossibility of any individual reading them all, he discusses the problem of how the right reader is to find the right book. The analogy with the problem of finding the right blog is obvious. However with blogs we do have search engines to help us. I found Zaid's book by the process of seeing it on a table in Hornsey Library, Crouch End - ( there are some reviews on Librarything - here they are http://www.librarything.com/work/9556/reviews) - Somehow one does not encounter blogs with the same degree of serendipity. There is something about the experience browsing along a shelf which so far, search engines cannot match. But I digress.
There is no doubt what ever that the way in which that cluster of technologies we now all call the "Internet" has reduced the cost of worldwide publication essentially to zero is a revolution. We are all living through it; we know we are in it, but actually we are quite clueless as to where we are going to end up. There is almost an element of forced "democratic equality" caused by this as even the most expert pundits display expertise by declaring their lack of certainty. They have as their precedent that distruster of the written word, Socrates. Who was the wisest of men, because he knew that he knew nothing. We know this because although he thought books a really bad thing, basing the whole of the "Socratic Method" on living dialogue between the actively engaged, it was WRITTEN down, in a book, by his follower Plato. Distrusting writing as being bad for the memory, and producing books which unlike the author when present could not be argued with, we cannot doubt that printing, the third great information technology, would have appalled him. But would the fourth? For one of the things you can do with the internet is enter into dialogue. Whereas before a dialogue required that you meet someone, with the internet discussion can happen, without people having to be in the same place; nor do they have to be connected at the same time. (Before getting too carried away with the novelty of this we should note that even in that so distant, and recent, period of paper snail-mail correspondence clubs existed. When learned academies elected foreigners to correspondence membership it was not a figure of speech. But paper post was much slower and much more expensive. )
To begin with printed books based themselves as to design -" look and feel" - on the hand copied volumes that had been traded for centuries. Soon the possibility of producing multiple copies so quickly, and, the longer the print run, at a lower marginal price, changed the way books could be used. And what they could do. Those who wish to stress the power of technology and the way it seems to cause things to happen say that the invention of printing lay behind the reformation. Surely more subtle than that. But the reformation that happened used printing, and there can be no doubt that a reformation that used printing was different from one that did not. Printing, and the availability of books to read caused literacy to be of more use to the general mass, and so encouraged the spread of literacy. Books were not mass produced to fill a market need; it was being able to produce them that created the market.
In the same way internet technologies began with email. This just worked by analogy with ordinary mail - a message sent from someone to someone about something. To start with, apart from being typed, it was just like sending written notes. Only really fast. The first time I encountered email was on a VAX 11/780 computer in a college in Dublin. About 1979, so before the Internet. You could only use VAXmail to communicate with other people holding accounts on the same computer, which we got at by using time sharing terminals. The ability to swap messages back and forth so fast, in the knowledge that the other person would get your message both real soon, and at a time convenient for them made it hugely useful between admin offices. So much better than "telephone tennis" Then the students found out about it, and lacking the ( uninvented ) mobile phone, and generally having no phones of any kind in their flats/ bedsits /houses in multiple occupation/ squats, started using email to organise their social lives. When the manager of the computer facility saw the rise in message traffic, he shut down VAX mail. He was a computer scientist and knew what computers were really for. Doing really hard arithmetic, not messaging.
That kind of email was useful because fast. (And no mobile phones, and no txt messaging) By then, in Dublin, post took between one and two days to be delivered, with second day delivery the likely period . When my mother was a student in Dublin in the 1930's there were four collections and deliveries in the City a day. So one could send an invitation to someone for tea, on a post card, first thing in the morning and get their reply by lunchtime. In due course first the fax, and then email would occupy a niche vacated by snail-mail. But intriguingly (at least I find it intriguing ) BEFORE the technology to supersede fast paper mail had come into being, fast paper mail had died out. There were, of course, blokes on motorbikes, but that expensive.
Soon email lists started (and with them spam). The basic principle of using computer networks as a way of distributing text at very low cost had been established. All the developments since then - web pages and then blogging software are low cost ways of distributing print. They lower the barriers to entry to for anyone who wants to write anything. - "it used to be said that if a sufficiently large number of monkeys typed for long enough they would write the works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the internet we know this is not true" so wrote someone whose name escapes me - Blogging software "just" makes it easy to post stuff. (where computers are concerned never underestimate the value of "easy") The other essential development, the search engine as it is called in general and google as we all know it in particular enables us to find relevant text. After a fashion. The particular blogging software I am using now combines email and blogging in a way which really does seem to be so very simple. So maybe thats why I am blogging now. It just got irresistibly easy. Also, perhaps it is time. I will explain that in another post.
(By the way I would say that the first great information technology was the idea of recording information symbolically, the second was the use of an alphabet to represent speech, the third was printing using movable type, which is only practicable for alphabetic writing, and the fourth "the internet")