Friday, 23 October 2015

boring economics teaching is interesting

Related: Bad Economics Teaching for the twenty-teens from data on Unistats, 2015 Better Economics Teaching: some off-the-cuff suggestions based on being a 1980s student The British Economic Crisis - a similar book to Robert Peston written in the 80s - Star Courses: the least satisfied, most bored and lowest paid UK graduates, written 2015 Boring Economics Teaching is interesting: how someone managed to teach economics from memories of an old textbook at the peak of the worst recession since the 1930s, and tried to cover-up for government causing the recession. Journal Articles by Professor Les Fishman - unbelievable beliefs - 1980s recession explanations I wrote - UK unemployment 1980s from the Begg 1984 textbook

Boring economics teaching is interesting

Looking at the textbook page 440, figure 19.2, do you think the 1979 monetarist policy worked for the UK?

Definitely agree
Mostly agree
Neither agree nor disagree
Mostly disagree
Definitely disagree
"We used to believe on Keynsian solutions; now we believe on monetarist solutions" - Professor Leslie Fishman, standing at one end of an economics teaching room at Keele University 1984-7
Words fail me

Postwar UK unemployment (excluding school leavers). Graph going off the top of the usual scale from textbook page 440

It's the mid-eighties at a midlands university called Keele.
A quarter of the workforce is unemployed, sick, or on government schemes.
The scene is an economics degree course

This is the middle of an economic crisis that effects most people in the room and their parents, but is no crisis at all in the newspapers. Technically, turnover in the economy stopped shrinking after the first quarter of 1980 as North Sea Oil and financial services added some numbers. In the newspapers, graph 19.2 is just a puzzling thing that happens to other people, but there is still a special slot on the TV news called "Today's Redundancies", which is always frightening: the number of unemployed people keeps rising.

The best factories close fastest, like the MG car factory in 1979, hit by an exchange rate hike.  A new UK textbook spells-out the start of the factory-closing process. Factories making products unfit for export - like Morris Ital - staggered-on longer, disproving Wikipedia's account of the recession as including closure of just the inefficient factories. That comes from some different source to reality: an idea of how to shock the habit of inflation out of the US labour market called something like Rational Expectations, re-written into a kind of Jeoffrey Archer plot regardless of facts.

It's all new territory for the bad economics courses, usually teaching theory about X-shaped diagrams for micro-economics and demand management for macro-economics, finishing with a kind of charting excercise in which some of the rules are combined as a chart with lots of dotted lines and that's called "modelling". Not that Keele ran a bad economics course in the early 80s: small groups of students tried to solve problems with a tutor and learn theory along-side, but times change.

The college has shrunk a lot fast. It has to shrink overheads and pay redundancy money. The redundancy scheme is merged with a technical college down-town, so a lecturer can be made redundant from one job and emerge, surprised, teaching at the other college instead of getting a pay-out. Other staff choose unpaid leave without replacement [Tribe, 2014, p3, footnote 8]. A 64 year-old head of department called Professor Les Fishman teaches flat-out to fill the gaps.. Problem-solving workshops are abandoned and replaced by cheap lectures called a "class" in whatever subject an available lecturer is willing to teach from one end of a classroom to dozens of bored-looking students. The course might be made-up from teaching materials attached to old textbooks, or it might come from a lecturer's research and personal interest - the choice just depends who is available to fill a gap in the timetable.

The parts of the course fit together like the standard parts used to make a the Morris Marina and Morris Ital, and somehow the thing drives. Staff don't want further fundng cuts and it must have crossed their minds that un-controversial teaching could help. In English Literature, part of one course is called "Victorian Poetry". In Economics, a macro course on how the government can't afford pensions is replaced by a standard textbook course on four-quadrant IS-LM. Click on the link to an image search to see what sort of thing it is.

Oddly the ISLM standard part is very very close to the subject that everyone in the UK is worried about - whether government economic policies are making things worse - but it is not that. It is about memorising what to write in an exam if a curve moves up or down on a certain chart devised by professors of algebra a decade or two ago, probably in another country. The graphs do not have numbers down the sides.

There is an rule of thumb: economists do not predict recession. This could be because economists studied in a boom. Other people studied economics in a recession while their college was short of cash and just taught whatever was cheapest to teach, to the largest possible number of students, who sat and scowled-back, never to think about economics again after graduating. The ones who keep their patience with the subject studied in a boom. That is my economic theory.

If I was an american economics professor and put that into algebra, maybe with a curve on a graph for textbook writers, that might get into Econometrica, but that's another problem with Econometrica. I bet they prefer articles from a proper professor with serious specs, and to be a US professor when people respected Econometrica you had to pretend you hadn't heard of the welfare state or anything like that and not profess anything that anyone would want to know, or you'd get a summons from the McArthy Committee and then your boss would get help from a special department at the CIA to organise unfair dismissal without a reference. A long sentence but true. Samuelson the textbook-writer is one of the saner US economists compared to the rival school of thought, who are Thatcherite economic advisers. My professor is one of the saner ones too - a civil rights activist with an interest in Pete Seeger and ending the Vietnam War, who had joined an odd political party in his youth that sounded communist to the average american. Well it would do. It was called the The Commnunist Party USA. The Senate's equivalent to the McArthy Committee got round to him quate late, after he'd got a job at Keele, but he still teaches this stuff, and students still have to learn it. The picture is Professor Paul Samuelson and I had Professor Les Fishman, but they all have the same high-brow haircut and serious specs. In the states they wear suits, and when they move to the UK they buy tweed. The theory stays the same and the economy has to adapt to suit it; it is a pseudo-scientific disceplin designed to resist political interference more than a technique to measure and comment. Post-war economics professors might fail degrees on the current consensus view that "awareness / appreciation of contexts / knowledge" is vital to scrape-through a course and get a degree. If you could label the traffic-lights that allow a student to get a degree, the consensus document would look like this.
● Ignorance
● Awareness / appreciation of contexts in which techniques are relevant / knowledge
● Familiarity / proficiency / competent use

Students are the lucky ones, even if the course makes no sense at all.. Other people the same age are really bored and do anything but train-spotting to pass the time, sometimes acting-out the plots of Irvin Welsh novels, or The Full Monty or Billy Elliot. Other people the same age and older are working or on strike in coal mines under the campus, thinking about the same issues. In year two I lived next to the Silverdale Colliery branch line and counted about 50 wagons of coal at about 10 miles an hour going to some power station, as miners returned to work; I am in the right place to learn about economics.

People occasionally ask me questions when they discover that I'm on the course, like - "what's the answer?".

Begg, 1984, page xix
Ninety weeks, half-time, minus time spent on exams and short courses, to find out why so many parents are redundant or bust, so many student places are cut, so few job prospects exist, and life is turning in to an Irvin Welsh novel, from a teacher with an opposite idea of who pays him and why.

Please excuse this prose; it makes no great sense. It is a series of notes cobbled-together and just leads where it goes. Sometimes a long-bit spins-off into another more coherent blog post. Further down there is a more structured bit with headings about the reasonable teaching of economics courses next to what happened.

The graph above is from the first edition of "Economics, British Edition", Begg, 1984, the main book recommended to students for background reading. Do you think anyone should say anything if the professor pretends he hasn't noticed?  Definitely agree | Mostly agree | Neither agree nor disagree | Mostly disagree | Definitely disagree | What do people do in Greece when this happens?

Someone in a class asks about "Today's redundancies" and why the day's factory has closed. It has just stopped making so many Servis washing machines, just an hour down the motorway in Darleston, so the student quite likely has some connection to somewhere like that, like redundant taxpayer parents who paid Fishman's double wage. One each.

Today's Redundancies is the subject that I guess people have commited years of their lives to study and want the man to teach. Washing machine factories that sustain a welfare state and employ UK taxpayers are an endangered speces and this one grew over generations of productivity & thrift .

"I don't know ... maybe it was the design or lack of investment or something like that"
, says Professor Fishman out of his double-paid arse.

Servis machines are the first ones to use microchip control panels. I know this from a Design Centre exhibit of how many components they had saved. The people who bought the brand off the receiver still write that these are "the first washing machines in the world to harness quartz technology for increased precision. This made the Servis Quartz one of the most advanced and reliable washing machines of its time. In fact some Quartz machines are still going strong today, over 30 years later."

"They won an award from the Design Centre", I say, in solidarity with my fellow student protester, because this is obviously about macro-economics and I'd seen the Servis exibit at the Design Centre in London. Fishman knows about the Design Centre. He's written an article for the people who run it.

"Oh. - I don't know", says Fishman out of his arse. This is the first thing he ever says to me. To quote an obituary, Fishman loses "any chances he had of reaching academic stardom" in my eyes. Apparently his generation of US economists could all be stars if they had a reasonable amount of talant. They pretended to have been the first to have discovered loads of rather obvous facts to write in Econometrica and called it a subject, in which professors weren't encouraged to refer to anything outside economic journals. Another obituary quotes what happend if you asked someone from this background a question that wasn't answered in the text book: "I don't believe you have the right to ask me that question. I have the right to freedom of association..."

Recessions follow wars.
Recessions follow banking and financial crisis.
Recessions follow economic advice from the wrong people.

The Thatcher adminsitration has a new policy.
They fiddle the exchange-rate upwards by whatever method, even if it cost money. This closes factories in such a crass way that you could call it deliberate. I do. Thatcherites would mostly eliminate manufacturing if it helped the cause of the moment, I think, because one of them says so. "We would mostly eliminate manufacturing", writes Professor Patrick Minford, an economics professor now employed by students of Cardiff University.

Officially the policy is called the "Medium Term Financial Strategy", and it is measured by something called Sterling M3. There is no monetary policy committee before 1997 - decisions in the early 80s are made by the chancellor Geoffrey Howe in public, and his boss's american academic economic advisers in private. The fact that Howe is close to resignation with a speech about currencies suggests that, in the early 80s, it's academic economists from the USA who make most of the decisions and that problems with the exchange rate even trouble even the chancellor.

Unemployment has reached three and a half million including half a million on government schemes. On top of that number are a growing number of sick people, and people excluded from statistics for thirteen different reasons like "excluding school leavers" quoted above the graph. There was another exclusion of everyone over 60. Or maybe it was 55 - all called economically inactive instead of unemployed.
We had a few essays to write about early 1980s unemployment stats, which I forget and so have googled information just recently.

"Inactivity rates increased following the recession, reaching a peak of 23.2 per cent (7.82 million) in the summer of 1983, with most of the increase accounted by males" - [J Jenkins of the Office for National Statistics in Economic and Labour Market Review, August 2010, found on google. My choice of software doesn't allow easy references to souces except links, and this source doesn't even allow a link. If anyone wants to know sources please email shop at veganline dot com and I'll probably reply]

If inactvity rates for males of working age are higher than usual, they are higher still in Longton which has about the second worst unemployment rates in the UK as well as some of the best integration of factories and housing to allow easy delivery between factories and allowing people to walk to work. What could be one of the best places to live and work in manufacturing has become the worst places to find a job, because of the manufacturing link.

I don't know the exact figures for Longton because series of data changed just a year or two later, which is one reason why the 80s recession isn't remembered: people at the time faced series of printed data called things like Economic Trends which were obscure and hard to find in libraries because nobody knew what to do with them. By the time computers became cheap for number-crunching, there was a slightly different series of data on unemployment that starts in the late 80s.

There is a link to the 1930s recession, which was also caused by high exchange rates imposed on the people of the UK, alongside tariffs from other countries and tricky situations like deaths from a new form of flu effecting populations weakened by war, huge UK navel spending, and frustration in the colonies and protectorates and dominions, leading to tariffs on UK goods from Canada.

Provision for the unemployed in the 80s is a lot better than last time the numbers were so high. In the 1930s national insurance was new and a lot of people only had workhouses to fall-back on. Like Geoge Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. Workhouses in turn only had local, devolved funding to fall back on I guess- or at least that was the situation in the Irish famine a lifetime earlier. 20-teens thinking is this is more efficient because local.

Unemployment, like low pay now, is invisible. Most effected in the 1980s are people of student age and our redundant or ceased-trading parents. In my case, my mother returns to work doing temping jobs she doesn't like and my dad has less success at doing the same while his business runs-down. That's probably typical; dads are glum. Industrial areas like the midlands near Keele are much more effected than London. Future jobs are so unlikely that they're not even talked about, except as a joke. Not the Nine O'Clock News repeated "today's redundancies", little altered, as a sketch. It ends something like "Mrs Buggin's cake shop created three new jobs in Hampshire". The Young Ones has a pretend interview with a college careers advisor who says "there is hope...", as there was, but is interrupted by crass students. "Tacky schemes to get them off the register", as the minister descibes schemes like the Community Program in his diary, employ another half million. The Community Programme becomes one of the biggest employers of graduates in the UK according to a rep for the scheme, dispute requring two years' unemployment for employees.

If colleges teaching economics were more concerned with the local economy, and with facts about it, and with problem-solving for the wider economy based on facts, I think they would do better. This is worth saying because Keele sent sales teams round the world to Singapore while I was there, and tried to do more to educate people from Africa who already came-along, but if the education was all wrong and untrue then it didn't help anyone.

On a Keele economics course it is just possible for a student to talk to Professor Les Fishman, chief, who got his first permenant teaching job in America in 1955 when there were more professor jobs than applicants to fill them.

1980s recession explanations I wrote are now on their own page. People often write that the 80s recession, loss of industry, the defecit, and effect on a generation, were probably something to do with liberal reforms. Google the same point made alongside an opposite one on other sites like "economics help", which that the government fiddled the exchange rate. The 1984 Begg textbook agrees. My 1980s recession explanations agree too. My 1980s economics course seemed designed to stop students from finding-out.

The next box here is a lost introduction that needs to go somewhere,

Next come structured points about a long-forgotten economics course that must have been typical. It's relevant now to me, to anyone who wonders why economics teachers missed the 2008 recession coming-along, and to Keele Uni which is usually about number one for student satisfaction but where economics teaching is about bottom on the same score.

    If this page was structured, the punch line would be that this awful course could have been one of the best compared to the others like the PPE one that Cameron and Balls went-on about the same time, probably with the same text book but not the Keith Smith one or the emphasis on prose and diagrams over algebra.

    There was no great motive for writing to start with except the wierdmess of studying economics at the height of one of the biggest baddest UK economic events of the 20th century, while economics teaching on mixed courses still often excluded open economy economics in its teaching just as my course ignored the flood of imports caused by high interest rates, high exchange rate, and high tolerance of sweatshops among those who set the tariffs. Meanwhile. short economics courses from Oxford to Keele were teaching that theory came first, before real events, and that the theory did not include cheap imports that put 3 million people out of work after a fiddled exchange rate including so many students' parents and quashing so many students' prospects. Some of the people most effected by an economic car-crash were students listening to economists say blatently stupid things and ignore the important things that caused hurt.

    Dads were worst effected. Mums were effected badly too; my mum had to become the breadwinner doing jobs she didn't enjoy, but at the time it was dads who were more used to a single long-term job in a career that expected the same. According to research by Fishman and others, people tend to find out about their fitness for a job, and how to apply, from people they know. So my dad's loss of self employment left me without much idea of a trade, even though I knew a lot about HP finance companies because he worked from home. (Eventually I discovered hostel-work jobs via the only person who kept in touch from Keele, who took a job as a live-in volunteer at a homeless hostel.) Dads are a theme of the Fishman Bursary and obituaries as well. A lot of students at Keele had redundant or ceased-trading dads, but Fishman had a loving daughter who's dad was still employed, and she thought he was such a good economist that she wrote obituaries to say so, and to tell the family story including grandad Isaac Fishman's migration from Siberia, and left money to fund the Leslie and Eleanor Fishman Bursary.

    The people in-and-out of cabinet jobs, like a recent prime minister and a recent shadow chancellor, studied another short economics course as part of PPE at Oxford about the same time I sudied a joint-honours Economics course at Keele. They probably studied from the same textbooks and used a very similar syllabus. Their failure to have sensible debates about economics says something about the way short economics courses worked at the time. They work amongst newspaper proprietors, MPs, lobbyists and constituents who could all do woth a better education in economics that every teacher wants to give and every student wants to get, but something in the boundaries of the subject, the wide range of different expectationsm and the way it is traditionally taught, all make a lot to write about.

    I understand that things have got worse since the 1980s, with more mathmatical content in economics degrees and less staff / student contact time in universities. Time-out for sandwich years or a year abroad, and short pick-mix modules have made the sense of being on a course weak. Access to the internet and touch-typing on keyboards makes study a lot easier in other ways.

    Should economics teachers know about at least one economy, measure it, and discuss it with students in tutorials?
    No because teachers might be summoned to the McArthy Committee, followed by unfair dismissal. Or a hostile government might concentrate funding cuts on one university.
    Yes because decision-makers make bigger mistakes if nobody knows how the economy works, and anyway this group of students has signed-up, the course has been funded, and it's unfair to offer a maths course instead.

    The teaching on my course(this comes round twice)

    are good at explaining things.
    made the subject interesting.
    are enthusiastic about what they are teaching
    The Course...
    is intellectually stimulating
           - National Student Survey
    ...  increasing critical facility and independence as the [core] course progresses.... foster active learning. A variety of approaches to managing the learning process may be adopted to achieve this, including lectures, seminars, tutorials, workshops, peer teaching and learning, project-based learning, experiments, games and technology-enabled learning - Quality Assurance Agency consensus statement
    The professor has two or three decades of experience in the role and two or three times the average wage , mainly paid out of taxes.
    "In post-war America his political commitment wrecked any chances he had of reaching academic stardom in the United States once McCarthyism took root so he quit America to bring his family to Britain after winning a Ford Foundation fellowship to work in the economics department of Cambridge, where his mentor colleague was Professor Nicholas Kaldor. Later Fishman moved on to Keele University where he was appointed the first Chair in Economics. It was under his umbrella of inspiration..." - obituary of Nina Fishman who sounds nice.

    Well they both do. I only met the older Fishman, and only in the sense of staring at him across a room for three years and trying not to scowl too obviously while he delivered a scam of a course that should have been on Rogue Traders. Worse still, other technical teaching at colleges, other economics courses and economists are just as bad. This awful one was sometimes a lot better than others.

    "he remained a passionate believer in socialism, but looked at new developments in capitalism with lively interest"  - obituary of Leslie Fishman by Nina Fishman
    Fishman shows no sign of knowing what national insurance is, as the role of the state - he just uses the american term "welfare". In previous jobs he's said that students aren't capable of  "absorbing a textbook" and must be "spoon fed" with a little encouragement for independent thought. That was in the US in the 60s and more recently at Keele in the UK he has allowed problem-solving workshops in year two and three; he has allowed teaching of macro-economics about the welfare state and pension costs instead of the usual 1930s stuff. Then in 1986, something forced him back to the old habits of avoiding any kind of risk and saying "we" for an imaginary economics profession and teaching imaginary modelling called "IS-LM" which makes no sense outside of the USA in the 1930s.

    Normal service may be resumed as soon as possible

    If I read a clear prospectus in the year I applied - 1982 - it could have boasted a course with problem-solving "workshops" of six students each in years one and two, and presumably a lot of the teaching of theory followed from need to solve real problems. This is something that the post crash economics society ask for, if I remember right (I can't find the reference), and ought to be the default option for a few reasons.
      • Real problems would have made the theory a lot easier to remember, and saved time in revision later-on. Or time spent teaching the same theory twice on different courses because students look a bit blank about it.
      • Real problems would make clear whether a theory works in one context - like steel workers anticipating inflation in a wage demand - rather than another, like a steel works closing so that the hearth collapses and can't be used again.
      • Real problems would save studying pointless theory and untrue facts. This is from the Post Crash Economics Society, linked to a heavy mathematical course at Glasgow University in the 20-teens: "economists teach “theories now known to be untrue” (Joffe, 2011). These include: the U-shaped cost curve (and marginalist pricing in general), expected utility theory, Real Business Cycle explanations of recessions. In our experience, lecturers often note in passing - or if questioned - that these theories are not particularly illuminating, yet they remain on the curriculum. This is completely unacceptable". It is unfair on the tutors as well as the students.
      • Real problems-solving in groups is a way to introduce students to each other.
        This cannot be done by students individually after college; it is a rare situation in which people deliberately want to share opposite opinions. I doubt many people want to do it above the age of about 25.
        One of the sad things about politicians is that they do not show a great awareness of the other side's point of view, and a lot of them studied at college including some on PPE courses; they didn't pick-up ideas when they were young enough to want to learn.
      • The Latin Teacher Effect: the course with the worst career prospects produces the best applicants for teaching jobs; they have fewest other options. Colleges find it convenient to run courses in Latin because it is so easy to get staff. If they an find a way of building-in some Latin to other courses, better still. The same is true of algebra junkies and science courses. Students are told that they may have applied to learn engineering or biology or economics, but what they really need to learn is maths because it is so cheap to teach. Preferably with a bit of Latin.
        By the time I did years two and three in 1985-7, there was just one option in year three to talk about a subject, this time in a class of twelve. Everything else was the kind of cheap economics teaching that students complain about - a person standing at the end of the room like a weatherman, telling you a theory that their boss thought they ought to teach,which might be true, or might not, and is not what you signed-up to learn. So there was a reason why course descriptions were so vague - it was to allow for chaos.

        "I came into the system at its peak thinking, like any student, that things had always been this way" - Tribe, 2004, The Modern Econmics Curriculum, p3

        Begg, 1984, page xix
        If I had gone on a course the year I applied, in 1982, then students might very well have wanted to talk about unemployment and the way government made it worse by manipulating the exchange rate so that the better export-led factories all closed very quickly. By the time I did years two and three in 1985-7, there was a course of classes in which someone stood at the end of a room to explain conventional wisdom of a rather old-fashioned kind that ignored imports and exports. This was a nobbled course, run to be cheap and safe.

        The man who delivered a lot of old cheap and safe material

        Fishman left high school at the age of 16 and studied for a degree in Business Admnistration in California. His 1980s course for 20 year-olds is aimed at US 16 year-olds, as are most economics courses in the UK in the 1970s and early 80s and even now I guess - that's the strange thing. There are interesting lectures, and there are excercises in statistics, but the concepts and links to real facts are sketchy. However strange this 1980s economics course is, it turns-out that other economics courses are pretty similar. They're a but like lectures from Kermit the Frog, followed some algebra and a bit of prejudice from some ignorant man or another in the USA.

        Kermit the Frog and his creator share some common points on the CV:
        A puppetry class offered in the applied arts department introduced him to the craft and textiles courses in the College of Home Economics, [University of Maryland] and he graduated in 1960 with a BS in Home Economics.
        - Jim Henson, early life, in Wikipedia
        Fishman sounds like Kermit. Fishman's speech is un-affected by the person he is speaking to. He allways says "math" instead of "maths"; his anecdotes about Ford Motor Company are about Ford of Detroit, when they had a big office before the 70s oil crisis, not Ford of Dagenham in the 1980s [Smith - p143].  His accent is more of a memorable cartoon accent than other teachers and students who come from all-over the world, and his opinions about teaching are cartoon opinions too. Fishman says, without a source, "we have to teach this stuff in order to call this an Economics Course", part-way through a revision lecture on the four-quadrant diagram of ISLM in a closed economy, meaning a US economics courses, taught alongside textbooks that were in turn written to please course-writers and state universities in places like Alabama, West Virginia or maybe Bangladesh where there are univserities but no welfare state, and nothing like Keele social science teaching in the mid 1980s. To say "we have to teach this stuff" is refreshingly honest, but untrue. More likely the course was nobbled by pressure to look un-controversial, a-political, and so the previous modelling excercise in the funding of a welfare state was replaced by this more traditional one in how to expand a closed economy - useful if you are President Woodrow Wilson in 1935. Supposedly it is about how to expand a closed economy, but it is more about playing with diagrams; every possibly use of dotted lines and superscripted positions is used as a kind of show-off end of term project. As I studied it, I had trouble remembering whether "I" stood for "Interest" or "Income", but it didn't matter. The test was in where the lines intersected if moved.

        I still don't know whether Fishman's distanced approach to economic theory made this a better course, because teaching about institutions was allowed, or whether it would have happened anyway.
        • Did I mention that I had to watch this across a room for three years in order to stay off the dole and get £3,000 a year while he got about £60,000 and the chain of command got even more? Yes I did.
        • Did I mention that any students' patience for bundles of introductory courses is going to wear-out by age 21, and that the chance to discuss economics in a tutorial with strangers and a well-informed teacher will probably never happen again? No: that's a new one. It needs another paragraph somwehere. That happens in arts subject but for some reason it's not allowed in economics. I should also be angry with other economics college courses of the time: a recent Prime Minister and Shadow Chancellor both went on the same PPE course at Oxford, but found themselves unable to have a sensible conversation about the economy. 
        • Did I mention that I am still angry with the man for burning my chance to do a sane economics degree when it was an emotive subject and there were no jobs around? Yes: this has become clear.
        • Did I mention that the Cow Theory on Fishman's course - the theory that there isn't enough UK unemployment and that other countries aren't encouraged enough to run sweatshops - is still a problem today?

          No. But do a control+F for cow theory. UK taxpayers have paid via the Department for International Development and the British Council for a program called Delphe, funding development education in universities that are close to a lot of poverty like universities in Bangladesh or Sudan. The content of these courses is probably a load of cow-pat, ignoring the obvious cures for poverty like girls' secondary schools, pensions, and healthcare in favour of systems that encourage people to have vast families in the hope that at least one will survive and look after the parents in old age. This is the system that wiped out the UK textile industry with a free trade deal written for Bangladesh, and fuelled the trade around Rana Plaza.
        Anyway, authors are like scientists: they try to show; not tell. At the same time they are human beings selecting evidence from what's memorable and to-hand, so it's good to know where they are coming-from, even if you're not very cynical about their motives. For example when I studied, inflation was the big daddy of economics problems but in hindsight it only happened for a decade or two after the oil crisis and before cheap imports from sweatshops. The theories written about inflation were rushed-together very quickly from the ideas around at the time. Then someone probably justified them with a bit of algebra beyond the reach of undergraduates and hitched a job as a grand professor of rational expecations theory or such, whether the theory is true or not and whether or they can teach or not.

        Proving the Existance of Fish: a cartoon stuck on someone's door in the politics department down the corridor
        Most College teachers are paid as "lecturer" or "professor", but described to students as "tutor" on the notice boards that say who is going to exist in what room at what time. Fishman was one of my two third year economics tutors.

        What happened in other social science tutorials was that students would sit around wood-grain formica tables for inspiration, to discuss a documentary, or some facts like a table of statistics, a book, the weeks' lectures, or a combination of these. The discussions would be ordinary and rather stilted, but with luck there would be a cool person in the same tutorial group who would say something interesting, or at least enough students who had read most of the book and been to the lectures and could say something.

        Apparently that's what happens in the 20-teens on courses at the LSE: a tutor talks to twelve students at a time and they talk back.

        At 1980s Keele there is always a thrill of danger that maybe nobody has read a word of the book or been to a single lecture, and the tutor has to do all the talking for 60 minutes, but I only remember that happening once - in a foundation short course - and the tutor filled the hour very well. Down the corridor in some subject like Politics, someone had "Proving the existance of Fish" stuck-up on their office door; the idea was to encourage learning if possible and only talk for the 60 minutes if all else failed.

        In other social science departments, there were periodic essay requirements and a line of feedback on completed essays. Staff learned from students, as well as their own reading and research, to prepare the next years' teaching or whatever else they did. I studied straight-laced courses like politics, but the politics staff were prepared to teach subjects that brought a risk of argument or puzzlement; we discussed African democracy even in a short course. In hindsight, aged 50, if someone asked me to sit with 12 students and talk about African Democracy I'd be pretty scared, but Keele students were a placid lot and it went OK. That's what happened in the rest of the social science building. We did not have to recite opinions from academic journals unless we wanted to; we were there to develop our own ideas against facts, and probably more than at some other universities because teachers had to concentrate on the core of their subjects rather than the talk-about-talk. If I'd gone to Keele a year or two earlier, this would have happened in Economics too, but I was unlucky except for a little part of year three.

        Economics teaching broke the rules and still does, at most or all colleges. Attempts to write-down what a reasonable expectation should be include things like reference to facts and critical thinking. If anyone knows how to research this and checks-through all hundred-odd university economics departments in the UK, that researcher will find plenty that don't much refer to facts or specifically state that they don't require critical thinking in students who graduate.

        Professor Fishman stood at one end of a room like a genial weatherman. I don't remember, but it was probably the usual story: Gentleman Discovers Curve. The man had wrapped this curve in algebra and got it published in a journal. Fishman saw his job as explaining conventional wisdom to the little people - the undergraduates - in a rather nice way that didn't refer to the textbook but to journals and his own genial knack of explaining things. So we got a sense of being in the company of a professor - a taster course - but not any way of talking back.

        We had to understand the curves, which had not changed much since A-level, but this time we didn't move swiftly on to write an essay; we studied more of them and played with calculaters to try to do some kind of book-keeping for imagined movements of the curve. I wasn't very good at this and it wasn't what I thought I had signed-up for. My sums did not add up to the same result each time I tried them, nor the result on the back of the handout that's meant to be the correct answer.
        Students should be aware that it is now accepted wisdom that those with A level Economics do less well in Economics degree results than those without A level Economics - 1996 course description

        I had expected some interaction of truth and theory. I thought we would feed the curves somehow into a computer and find out if they were true.

        Fishman learned his trade at UCLA and University of Colorado, teaching people who hadn't done A-level and were there to avoid conscription or get a job with the help of a degree certificate, combined with the absence of conscript applicants.

        Keele was not an alternative to conscription. Students vaguely guessed that the degree certificate would not get them a job: "Road to Nowhere" and "Passenger" seemed to be default tracks played in the students union, played by wannabe DJs to an empty discos room in order that they should have something to put on the CV. There was better music - more varied and raw - on the John Peel Show, played by part-time bands who had got-going on the new four-track tape recorders they could afford from Japan and cut-out the cost of a posh recording studio. Unfortunately there was a system of slightly rigged charts and a radio 1 playlist committee which prevented many of them getting on the radio, but a lot of them played at Keele. Early 80s students ganged-up to vote for a bridge from the car park to the empty disco room, allowing bands to move their gear quickly. This bridge made Keele an easy place to perform. Bands came. Unfortunately there was no chance to learn any similar craft knacks at Keele, whether touch-typing or learning an instrument or plastering or scaffolding.

        We would leave to find that a load of other people had already been working for a while, which was bad for them but paid, and some had got "management experience" like ordering stationary and were to be our bosses like the boss in The Office. The Begg 80s economics textbook is keen on equal opportunities policies. When I left Keele, the only jobs were for hopeless quangos trying to solve social problems in London and the first jobs I got required candidates to state no un-necessary qualifications. A stated degree might have reduced by job prospects.

        I suppose that students were interested a bit in the subject.
        I suppose that students were interested a bit in the decade and that part of the globe.
        Why there were no jobs, and what could be done, but there was no normal social science teaching so I don't know what other students thought.We didn't talk to each other.

        The room was small enough for students to ask the odd question & get a reply, almost like the proper university departments next door. Opinion is devided about whether Fishman had anything to much to teach if he'd wanted to and known how. One opinion is that he had good ideas but didn't teach them.

        Economics introductory course

        Fishman just taught the untrue micro-economic orthodoxy, from books that say steel workers get together and bid-up their wages too high, causing inflation and redundancies, but can re-kindle the steel works after a brief monetary shock to the economy and work cheaper if they come to their senses. I can't find a reference to that in the Begg textbook, but it was a commonly-held view. I guess US steel-workers are quoted as an example in a theory called Rational Expectations.

        A bit like The Full Monty, but with more of a steelworks rekindling theme.

        Steelworks are an odd example because the furnace cracks when cool, but they're still sometimes quoted as an example in economics textbooks. I quote more or less from the textbook's account of the predominant monetarist school of thought about how government should manage an economy. And just as a steelworks cracks very quickly when it's turned-off, a factory full of scrap metal and housing development acarage gets cleared too. A facebook group for pictures of derelict factories is called

        The Begg textbook might not mention "rational expectations" but it does state a "lifecycle hypothesis", that (pretending ignorance of a welfare state) people can save and dis-save over a life-cycle. "students run-up overdrafts knowing that, as rich economists, they can pay ... back later". (Begg, 1984, p541). The only welfare state this book has heard of is the bit that employs economics teachers, so a third-world country is not poor for lack of pensions or healthcare or dole, but "low income families may be unable to spare the time for education and training or the money for machinery". (Begg, p5). Omission is not for lack of space. The book is 781 pages long and finds plenty of space to mention a false dichotomy between "command" and "free market" economies, without mentioning whether the state bit is a state pension, in the UK, or a state industry, as in 1980s India (p 12), and it even mentions dole in the form of supplementary benefit - the means tested bit at the time - but not unemployment pay which was the bit based on contributions. (p 604, 566, 594).
        Oddly enough, one of the students had a dad redundant from Shelton Steel Works which closed in 1978 and didn't re-kindle. Blast furnaces crumble if you turn them off, so they can't be re-kindled even if the owners and government agencies want to make it possible, which they don't. Oddly enough, nothing was said about that either. It was a bit wierd. Like the Stafford Hospital crisis nearby in 2005-8, when everyone was too polite to say anything or report anything and a local paper stated that it just wanted "good news stories" from hospitals. I expect some of the Stafford Hospital were studying at Keele and wrote essays to say that nothing was wrong. If you do a control+F for p663 you will see the textbook answer copied from the same 1980s textbook this man had chosen, but not read. It says that the monetarist consensus was massively wrong and why. That's a confusing thing about economics textbooks: they are slotted together like encyclopedias from different writers on different pages and then glossed-over to look neutral and technocratic. Fishman may have been too stupid lazy and arrogant to read the textbook that he recommended to students; I can believe that. This is the man who thought Colerado students couldn't "absorb a textbook" and needed to be "spoon-fed". But Fishman deliberately lied as well. He had read another textbook by a colleague - The British Economic Crisis - "For comments and help I would like to thank ... colleagues ... Leslie Fishman", it says in the acknowledgements, and on page 22:
        Between the beginning of 1979 and the end of 1980, the so-called 'effective exchange rate' rose 21.6 per cent and wage and salary costs per unit of output in manufacture rose 36.6 per cent. This added up to a decline in the competitiveness of British goods, according to the International Monetary Fund measure, of about 50 per cent: a change almost un-precedented over such a short period.

        In the face of these developments, exports held up fairly well, mainly due to exporters making great efforts to keep their prices down - export prices rose by well under half the rise in costs of production. But imports soared, since the stronger pound made them relatively cheaper; the recession intensified as British producers began to lose out in their own home market.
        Nowadays, if someone asks a Keele economics tutor about Northern Rock or Lehman Brothers, does the tutor say:
        "I don't know .... maybe they didn't give away free pens to attract new depositors?" "Oh: did they give away free pens?. Oh. I don't know. Back to ISLM in a closed economy and broiler chicken workbook examples". I expect they do.
        If someone asks about "Port Talbot steel works? does the teacher say "Maybe the staff all asked for positive pay rather than negative pay, as suggested by the textbook" If someone asks "What about dumping asset strippng over-valued home currencies and an unfair advantage to producers in countries no welfare state to pay-for, sometimes over-population, and government elite who stache money in swiss bank accounts thus lowering the value of the home currency even further, and maybe spending tax money in export subsidies as in Bangladesh or getting grants towards steels works from the Department for International Development as in China?"...Does the teacher say: "I don't know: there is a lot there that I don't know about, and we need students from China, so lets get back to the workbook examples" ?
        The difference is that Fishman could remember the times in the US when academics would have fake allegations made-up about them to end their careers if anyone thought they were a communist. Those that kept their jobs were safe people in the view of the employers, and they kept themselves defended behind a fortress of un-necessary algebra and formality and separation from students. Fishman did not get summoned to the McArthy committee of the US Congress. He got the Senate version, with two colleagues from Colorado University. I don't know where to find the minutes, but quite likely he said that economics was a boring technical, and used that as a defence. By the time he faced the committee he had already found work in the UK, but there are accounts of other people at Colorado loosing their careers and discovering, years later, that the chief of the college exchanged names with the CIA and that the CIA had an office advising on how to do an unfair dismissal for any staff who seemed radical. I found that reference on Google - it was about a politics lecturer who never taught again and a principal of the college, now dead, who's relatives declined to comment. I have lost the reference but this is all true.

        Economics as a textbook subject expanded quickly in cold-war america. That's when the textbooks were written. One came-out in 1947- Laurie Tarshis' Elements of Economics - but was boycotted and rejected for being partisan, then Samuelson's long textbook came-out in 1948 with its cold-war opinions about command economies, its pretended ignorance of social insurance, and its sense that great men knew a lot of technical algebra to justify the graphics. It covered a lot - general knowledge for 16 year-olds and grand conventional wisdom for college students. It sold all over the world and I guess it  defined the subject, so this is a good theory although partly untrue. There is an anecdote from an economics student on the day after the Wall Street Crash.

        The only pictures I can find of Fishman are of him speaking to say he wouldn't sign a "loyalty oath" at a university in California and a picture of him summoned-back to Colorado, near his old employer, to face some politician's McArthy-style committee. That was at a time when the CIA had a special unit to assist unfair dismissals of suspected communists, and there are records of Colorado University co-operating with them to supply lists of suspects and of people who's teaching careers ended in stress and unemployment. Something like that happened to Fishman's father who got exiled to Siberia. Something like that has just happened in Turkey, with large numbers of universities and schools closed and their ex-staff rounded-up and imprisoned alongside staff of the government colleges still open. I think there is a link in Fishman's case between being a boring, beurocrat of an economics boss and his background in jobs where you had to watch your back and not take any risks. I think there could be a link between that standard way of teaching economics - theory first for example - and its popularity in autocratic states.

        It's good for people to know what the 1980s recession was

        The common explanation of the early 1980s is that a few people were made unemployed because privatised industries employed less people than nationalised industries. I saw this vew put in a history program on TV - The 80s with Dominic Sandford; it has become a common view among analysts in the south and among graduates and the political class even though it was a mde-up story put to newspapers in the 1980s to boost one of the political parties.

        The idea that three million jobs could be lost because of a change in management priorities at British Steel, British Rail and British Gas, and loss of market share to fair competition from abroad just doesn't make sense. And that excludes the half million on government schemes and the people who ended-up on incapacity benefit, or not counted because they were too old or whatever other statistical decision made by a government-funded statistical office.You can google charts of employment in the coal mines, for example, which were a big lump of public employment, and see that the cuts came much earlier - they were more like the Beeching cuts in railways. What survived in the 1980s was a group of very large, easy-to-run mines, with a lot of equipment funded by cheap public loans. So a quick google disproves the theory.

        Someone arguing this point of view - that the unemployed fell out of privatised industries - has to agree that a lot of long-term private sector companies closed at the same time; the jobs were lost from industry, public or private. The map of unemployment then, and the map of house prices now, suggests that it was jobs at risk from international trade that were lost. The idea that 3 million jobs could be shed from the UK public sector comes from books like Samuelson that suggest that there are privately-run and pulic-run economies, with the US near one end of the spectrum and the UK in the middle. That view of the world misses the point that most of what the UK public sector does is public services; insurance-like services with their own history and reason for existance. Most of them are still here. So are the stupid economists who read the books, and who's ignorance dressed-up as expertise makes it harder for people to talk about the subject, teach it, write books, or make economic policies.

        What happens after an economic mess-up.

        A generation of people who looked for careers or any kind of job or even housing and stability after the 80s found it much harder, with casualties all-round. The economic growth through the 80s was, I expect, partly a growth of North Sea Oil exports that hiked-up the exchange rate just as the Bank of England liked to hike up the exchange rate; it was growth of a kind but not growth in career prospects, and for people who had a few things go wrong at the same time, it was easy to fall-out of ordinary life. I made my living for a decade or two just working for agencies that were meant to help these people. In Scotland and Wales, a generation of people decided never to vote Conservative again and to try to withdraw from the Westminster system that had allowed the damage which Dominic Sandford's history problem doesn't even acknowledge.

        The manufacturing crisis caused by bad economists, politicians who picked them and voters who picked the politicians. And Murdoch & Maxwell news.

        UK unemployment peaked at 12% in the mid 1980s on this graph, or just under 20% including the million people on government schemes. Professor Fishman taught at the time of the peak.My choice of course was a cut-down textbook version of an economics degree, a bit longer than the E in PPE or the Minor that goes with a US Major. I didn't know that you shouldn't do a short university course after an A-level in the same subject because of the big overlap. I imagined that we qualified A-level students would feed data into a computer and discuss whether any economic policies really worked. My guess wasn't a lot different from the course that ran in "the early eighties" in one account, with "workshops" of a tutor and six students trying to solve problems with economic methods in years two and three. It was the 1985-2008 intake who got a bad deal, and possibly later-still.

        The course was bundled with a lot of stuff like a campus and a degree qualification and a foundation year so it was harder to give-up than other economics adult education classes, which are rare. It was like an Open University or Birkbeck course I suppose, with built-in dissapointment for people who hang around a campus for three or four years and anyone who has to teach them.

        Maybe people only take economics degree courses because they are bundled with a package and so, as at Keele, it is a pity to drop-out. I took Economics and English at Keele, with other shorter courses, hoping to work in journalism. The course happened in an industrial area of the UK in the 1980s, a time when the UK was not as afflicted by economics as Greece today, but heading that way as much as Portugal or Spain. I would like to know how it compares with Greek economics teaching now.

        Pass-notes : 1980s UK unemployment

        Add a sixth to the height of the peaks of the graph (starting at zero) to include the half million people on government schemes and as much again for changes to the way employment was counted. (My figures come from and hansard reports of statements in the commons about numbers of people on employment schemes.) That gets you to about a sixth of the workforce - the same as the 1930s. Youth unemployment was probably 60% some areas around the Keele like Longton after a new government fiddled with the exchange rate, and there was a special slot on the national TV news for the day's redundancies and largest factory closures day by day, from MG Abingdon in January 1980 to Acorn Computers (who made the department desktops) in 1985. Early casualties were the well-known factories that did a lot of exporting, like MG and Acorn Computers, but UK factories generally did a lot of exporting. I forget how much. I think that about a fifth of GDP was international and it is probably similar now.

        Journalists model of UK manufacuring was a model of car - the Morris Marina - because it was parked all-over the place and mixed-up in peoples' lives, while a lot of manufacuring like Silverdale Colliery or the local steel mill were huge but known mainly to people on business, such as the staff. To everyone else they were just a big set of gates - often a big set of gates up north, seen only on telly during the strike news, or out of a train window. If you happened to see something like the train with a weeks' coal from Silverdale Colliery, running at 10 miles an hour with 50 wagons, it was a better model for the coal board than the Morris Marina which came from a rescued private-sector firm; this type of economic model suggests a lot but has limits.

        The Morris Marina became so much of an economic model that managers complained that their every decision was over-blown in the media. The Chrysler Avenger was just as bad, while the Ford Cortina and Vauxhall Cavalier were not much better.

        The Austin and Morris production lines were a good choice for a model of the UK economy, but with built-in assumptions, like all economic models. The Austin Allegro was built in Belgium until the mid 80s when that factory was closed, so it wasn't an emblem of how things were done only in the UK. The Morris Marina and then Austin Ital were built with an under-developed engine and gearbox, ugly dashboards, false economies of undercoat, and quality control problems but so were Chrysler Avengers and the cars that had better research and development built-in, allowing them to sell to sales reps: the Ford Cortina and Vauxhall Cavalier. And it means something that production of MGs - desirable cars that sold all over the world - ceased first in about 1980. That suggests that the good products like MG or maybe Steelite that were sold all over the world had bigger problems than the bad products like ceramic figurines or Morris Marinas that were only meant for the UK and could carry-on a little longer in production.
        MG cars produced mainly for export - outside the factory

        A google of "Unemployment statistics from 1881 to the present day" discovers tables and graphs of how quickly manufacturing closed, as measured by people stranded on the dole. The factors of production - the machines and the networks and buildings - dispersed via auctions for scrap or export or later for new housing developments to house bankers.

        I guess that export-based factories, that made good things well, closed quicker because of the exchange-rate-hike done by raising interest rates. I don't know because it wasn't part of my course to find out, and there was no chance to ask tutors if they happened to know. My third year tutor - Kieth Smith - made a few requests to the Central Statistical Office to check UK exports in more detail. He found that those things still exported were things that competed on low wage rates - the opposite of what anyone would expect. These requests are rare; not many economists ask for detail, so I doubt there's much information to be googled about this. Near Keele was a foundry that made cast iron parts for bicycles. Within walking distance. Tube Investments and Raleigh had been part of the same group for a while; the factory was well-linked with the rest of the trade, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to export or import a bicycle with cast iron parts. Meanwhile Surrey Steel Components in London, which I thought made aluminium bicycle parts, closed in 1984. I read about it in the local paper, and assumed it was the same as GB Sport in West London. You notice these things if you patch-up an old bike. But not if you do a textbook economics course, so I never discovered whether bad factories making cast iron bike parts survived better than good factories selling for export.

        As good factories close, drivers with money can get a car some other way. As can buyers of Russel Hobbs toasters from the potteries, Doc Marten boots, once made by every UK-based welted boot factory, or Acorn Computers. Usually, buyers simply go to the shop buy a similar product off the shelf, possibly with the same brand on it. Often, the under-cut brand separates its IT - mainly the brand - from manufacturing and either sells the brand, or becomes a kind of amorphous international brand-holding agency with outsourced production in the way that Evan Davis celebrates as a wonderful thing in his "Made in Britain" book. Most toasters are commissioned for the UK market by a UK company in Kingston that has its own range of designs and suppliers in China, ready to make kitchen appliances with whatever label anyone asks to apply.

        Scimitar sports cars - similar to MG - made near Keele

        The more expensive brands spend more on advertising, promoting consumer debt like HP finance, consumer culture, and overpriced branded consumer goods, often advertised to people who can't afford them to promote un-met wants. The stress of debt or advertisements that suggest poverty in failure to afford could make work for Keele graduates of International Relations or Social Work. Urban rioters in 2011were very keen to loot Addidas branded goods from the likes of Sports Direct. The same system of over-advertised branded imports from China prevents genuine UK brands from starting-up. MG sports cars ceased production about 1980, and a Tamworth company near Keele made a replacement sports car for a few years, but, somehow, people were becoming more and more used to buying a familiar brand rather than buying a specification or buying what's made locally. Scimitar sports cars ceased production. I doubt that any of the kinds of people who might have got jobs at Scimitar or Belstaff took part in a potteries riot to steal sports cars or Belstaff clothing, but it would have been neat if they had done. Life is slightly different in a country without factories. It's harder to run editions of Top Gear if production is corporate and distant. I don't know if there is a Top Gear for toasters, but the principal probably applies somehow, for better or worse. I read somewhere that the UK in the 80s was the only market where users were used to seeing something like a wheatsheaf on their toaster, so maybe the imported ones were better looking but Russell Hobbs made the best of a bad market with its designs. It's very unlikely that research and development will happen in the UK if a corporate head office is in some distant country. Academics have made that point with tables of data to demonstrate. It's also expensive and difficult to set-up the next factory once the previous one is been auctioned-off, staff dispersed, suppliers run-down or further away, and the land classified as residential because the council doesn't like factories and the planning act came-in after the factory was built. Extreme cases are the steel furnace which crumbles if let cool, or the deep coal mine which is capped with cement on closure. Mundane cases are the workshops bulldozed for bovis flats because a council committee things factories are ugly and won't use their powers to force the empty space to be let cheaply. If the factory is owner-managed, the boss leaves depressed. It's hard to start a manufacturing business if you can't buy as much as possible from other manufacturers in small quantities to start with. From a consumer's point of view, it's hard to feel good about something made on the other side of the world, unless that feeling is based on advertising. Selling the brand to a rival importer is not the same thing as making the good; it doesn't produce as many good UK jobs. It may be lucrative because it makes the imports familiar and sell better. Economists like Evan Davis in Made in Britain can suggest that this is a sign of the wonderful knowledge economy so valuable to modern Britain, but trademarks don't employ the next generation of people to do something new, and, when the next generation grow-up in China or India with more confidence in their own tastes and styles, are they really going to pay a premium for writing "MG" on something anglophile? Cheaper to write it with a marker pen. Even if they do pay extra, the trademark is not owned by people in the UK. Even if the MG trademark is bought by people in the UK, it won't be employer here; the activities of a UK-owned trademark do not help money circulate around the UK as much as a car factory. Thinking back to those laid-off from MG or Servis or the Acorn factory that made BBC computers, they are the immediate short term problem and their generation suffers for a lifetime. Not that getting out of bed on Monday morning is good - I'd rather have a minimum basic wage and stay in bed - but it's good to do something useful, and even something sociable, and something paid that puts tax into the system. At college we did write an essay about the dozens of changes made by government to the way it counted unemployment in order to reduce the headline total, such as declaring that anyone over 60 was unlikely ever to get another job, so they weren't really unemployed, were they?

        The register of unemployed people should be read alongside "Tacky schemes to get them off the register" as Alan Clark, the minister responsible, wrote in his diary. This link has an example at 4'05". The USA had the Hoover Dam in a recession. Italy had motorways. Schemes which encouraged circulation of money locally (rather than on imports), which employed people, and could be wound-down in a boom. The UK had The Community Programme, which did things like running something called a "garden festival" on the site of the local Shelton steel works. Some economist had advised the government against any activity that could crowd-out with the private sector, which would have been a fair point in a boom but this was 1984. A target of 230,000 Community Programme employees was stated in the 1984 budget. The figure for Youth Training Schemes looks like 250,000. The Richard Garrett washing machine factory became one of their training centres and then a museum that states how the YTS was run commissioned from an office called the Manpower Services Commission. "Don't go on the dole - go on the sick", said one miner in a doomed mine that was reported in The Times or The Observer about that time. A lot of those who were made redundant had narrow ranges of job skills, just as places like the coal mining village of Ebbow Vale had a narrow range of jobs. Whether or not a redundant person decides, tactically, to pretend to be sick, it was likely to happen anyway. If you give up a manual job you need to change your diet a lot. UK cookery is not that subtle (lax labelling regulations keep it that way). You need to find other interests. UK suburbs are not interesting (there is a planning act to keep them that way). tries to put some numbers on the process and suggests that doctors who signed sick notes or civil servants who read them or even ministers went-along with the process, which seems plausible. I made my own living in the 1990s and early 2000s from people who were not fit for hard work, could justify a sick note, and for that reason were allowed special deals from housing benefit departments in dry-houses or ex-offender hostels or homeless hostels or whatever the industry provided from one decade to another. There was massive unemployment of people at student age, or made redundant; massive loss of prospects for them, and massive loss of opportunities for everyone as so many good factories closed without good reason. I don't know the local youth unemployment figures because we didn't do numbers in the Keele economics course so I have guessed the 60% figure given above - Longton, near Keele was in the news for being about the second worst unemployment black spot, and I've read that Spain has had 50% youth unemployment during their Euro crisis. The series of figures for youth unemployment starts just after this time, when more international standards of counting were introduced; I don't know if any breakdown by age and region exists in 1970s and early 1980s figures because, as I said, we didn't do numbers at Keele and the current series of numbers for youth unemployment starts just after that time. I think people watched television by the 1980s even if I used an inherited valve-powered telly some of the time. We saw government adverts put-out at times to re-assure those still in work that things would get better. They didn't mention the Community Programme and it's garden festival on the steel works site. I remember adverts were written as though to promote employment in clear sensible organised ways from taxpayer money:
        • Inward investment. You can get an idea from the Not The Nine O'clock News "Made In Wales" video below. The advert's catchphrase was "Made in Wales".
        • Self-employment (catch phrase "We're going it alone")
        • Re-employment ("Getting a job is a job in itself").
        • Emmigration (no advert but a lot of people went)

          My own parent's HP finance company had stopped taking new business just after 1979, about the time of the MG Abingdon factory closure, but my dad was still trying to collect and repay debts for years. My parents were early victims of the 1979 policy of raising interest rates to reduce inflation - the idea that the chancellor of should play a trick to close factories, intending to make things cheaper in the shops. They were brave about it as parents are, even when the school housemaster rang-up at intervals to be rude for some reason. Well, one motive was obvious: my school fees were paid by a fund for old wellingtonian parents who ran out of cash near the end of their childrens' time at school. The worse the housemaster did his job and the ruder he was to my dad over the phone, the more likely I would change schools and save cash, which was short a the time. My father hung-up the phone.

          People who read books like Robert Peston will know more about the lending trade than manufacturing, and why lenders are among the first to loose in a recession. Specially lenders who borrow some of their money to re-lend.
          • First, existing customers loose work. Payments dry-up. Eventually, back comes a clapped-out car worth less than the debt. The cars were so badly made that a limited collection of keys would get a lot of Fords open and started, but driving them home was exciting as bits fell-off or went wrong.
          • Second, referral agents dress-up bad business as good business, just to get the comission. Imagine yourself as a second hand motor dealer with cars you can't afford to repair and customers who can't get secure work to afford to buy them. Put like that, you have trouble paying the rent for your site on Graham Road Hackney. An idea comes to mind. Put "valuable repaired car" "employed customer in secure work" on the proposal form, and you get a commission. This magnifies the problem for lenders, particularly if some lenders' money is borrowed for re-lending. My dad's business closed about the same time as the export manufacturers who were other early victims of the recession.

            People who read about 21st century economics in the UK - say in 2009 - will know more about the banking crisis than the manufacturing crisis. One edition of (I think) Panorama showed that Brittania Building Society, then based in Leek, set-up a subsiduary at arm's length with a commercial-looking name. The purpose of this subsiduary was to refer bad business to Brittania and earn commission. For example a career psychiatric nurse thought he might get some buy-to let mortgages. He wasn't great at business. He was told by the company's rep that it made sense to buy new-build flats on the Thames in east London as a buy-to-let landlord, at a high projected value. What could possibly go wrong? That wasn't the business of the commission agents, although some managers did contact Brittania and ask why their employment system of targets and commissions seemed to be rigged to force them to refer bad business. There is still a web page for Platform Home Loans:
            "With over 10 years experience in the intermediary mortgage market, our customers can depend on our knowledge, expertise and product excellence. To date, we have originated over 165,000 mortgages worth over £16.36 bn of mortgage business. We have also won numerous industry awards including the coveted Your Mortgage Award for Best Intermediary Mortgage Lender for 5 years running."
            Brittania's bad debts were so large that the firm had to close or merge, and pulled-down it's merging partner, the Co-Op bank, with it as a majority mutual organisation.
          1979 was also the year of the Banking Act, which licenced deposit-takers and users of the word "bank". The 70's secondary banking crisis involved lots of not-quite-banks taking deposits for things that only made sense in a boom, like second mortgages, and then going bust in the next recession. The 1979 Banking Act made it hard to take deposits off the public, almost impossible to start a new firm called "bank". My dad only had one depositer - Mrs Crow - so it wasn't a bit deal for him, but in the new regime it was harder to raise money if you wanted to compete with banks as a lender until the P2P work-around of the 20-teens. It's always hard to know why projects that seem good, that get on Tomorrows World, or that offer good jobs don't get loans and the answer is probably different in each case. But a google would probably find something about long-term failure of UK lenders and investors to do business with good borrowers and risk-splitters; the system wasn't made for that purpose. The system was for people in good jobs to invest so-much-a-month into a fund till age 65 with encouragement from tax breaks, and for approved funds to employ very highly-paid people to invest in Sports Direct, and for a pension then to be paid to those very highly-paid people. I read in Robert Peston that banks withdrew a lot from UK lending in those days, so that lack of bank lending from NatWest was part of what stopped my dad re-opening for new business. NatWest Chiswick got through several managers. Each time my dad explained what he did to one manager, that manager would be dissapeared by head office and another would be plonked behind the same desk. My dad explained that he lent to niche markets ignored by the main lenders, like people who
          • lived in inner city postcodes and
          • bought older cars on HP ....
          • through a dealer in Graham Road Hackney who decided how honest the referral forms would be.
          That's three above-average risks: NatWest were probably right not to lend. Old motor caravans were another niche market that paid quite well even in a recession. Bigger finance companies wouldn't finance old motor caravans because the computer said "no", but people only drove them once or twice a year so the things kept their value. The buyers were often in steady jobs or retired, and less effected by recession than people in Hackney factories. The dealer was in Chiswick, near the NatWest branch. NatWest were probably wrong not to lend. Anyway, they didn't lend. I was able to go to college because, if my parents submitted their dismal tax returns to Hounslow Council, I was entitled tuition fees plus a full maintenance grant paid a term or two late. That's about the same amount as you get on the dole, paid in one go for a third of the year. I think my parents had hopes of re-starting the business because they bought a computer and software. It was more help to me in getting jobs than the courses at the college where I did a degree. I wanted to study industrial design, but didn't really know how to do it after the first college refusal, and didn't realise that I didn't need good A-level results to study it. So I followed the herd and used the robot clearing system that somehow found places on the University system that everyone else seemed to want to use. The system where people go to talk about talk, rather than learning how to make things. I was mainly at college to study general or political things and get life experience, but a job skill would have been good and I was on the lookout for a way to get cheap finance for my dad's HP company. I didn't discover ways of bundling-up debts into bamboozlement bonds with silly credit ratings as Robert Peston says that other borrowers did, but my dad did try being a credit broker and had hopes of selling-on his debts to a mug of a bank - Bank of America was mentioned - in a buck-passing excercise. The garage in Hackney would supply dodgy finance deals; my dad would pass them on to Bank of America. I don't think he would have done it if it ripped-off Bank of America. I think he would only have done it for good loans. Anyway it didn't happen; that kind of crassness happens more when groups of people have careers to maintain by maintaining conventional wisdom. It seems pretty silly when one self-employed person thinks "shall I rob Bank of America?". By good luck, I was at a college where the canteen food was forcibly pre-paid and hitchhiking there from London was almost free from a service station near Edgeware tube. For those 19 year-olds who think it's stylish to eat scraps of food, it's possible to cut costs by eating food off abandoned trays in service stations, but there was no need and anyway buses were getting cheaper; Thatcher reforms weren't all bad. I also gained life experience that a bitter twisted madly-anxious ex-boarder might not have got in other ways. "I should know, because I've been there, but not very often" as the Smiths lyric says. When the maintenance grant finally arrived, I became rich in student terms and the Lloyds Bank computer gave me a Mastercard with a high credit limit at preposterous interest rates, so careful theories about how the money supply could be controlled by government weren't plausible. Those theories belonged to an era in the UK in the 1930s when investors put their savings in government bonds, just as current investors put their savings into housing, with the same careful attention to the money pages of broadsheet newspapers. These things still happen, but consumer credit customers just splurge; my dad's HP finance customers were only dimly aware that their loan was about half paid-off, on average, over the course of the loan, so the interest rate was about double what it first seemed. They knew the interest rate; it was written as an APR figure in big print on the contract, but they didn't do careful calculations or have a lot of choices. Meanwhile, a new kind of product emerged outside of Keele student life. A TV programme called "The Kinky Boot Factory" shows Mr Pateman of WJ Brooks bootmakers at a Dusselfdorf trade fair, after spending the night in a sleeping bag on someone's floor. He used to make a lot of DMs, but the largest manufacturer bought exclusive use of the trade mark in order to sell more imported boots. At the Dusseldorf trade fair, a few feet away from the WJ Brooks Devine stall is something like a fair ground, run by another rival who sells imported boots from outside any welfare state, from a country with a lowered exchange-rate. Someone in the style of Nike and Addidas. "This is the problem", says Mr Pateman; "They bring boots into the country for $16, and all the rest [of the price] is advertising". Outside of student life, that's what people buy with their new visa and mastercard credit limits. I met someone who can remember the exact year that imported brands like Nike and Addidas took-over the life of teenagers on a london housing estate.------- Economics of the sort seen on TV screens and experienced by everyone in the lecture hall formed no great part of the course, even though a lot of students were in similar situations. A lot of students must have wondered about this government policy of closing factories to reduce prices, which seemed mad. It would have been good to see how an informed adult discussed the madness. But on the core course we didn't discuss it. Instead we studied obsolete stats skills nearly half the time: whether a blob of data is really a blob, if you don't have a computer to check. Most of the rest was spent doing A-level again, this time taught in a more theoretical way with references to academic journals, rather than textbooks, and that was about it. X-shaped diagram about micro-economics. X-shaped diagram about macro-economics. Savings, circulation of money. The course went further than A-level in putting these together into a thing called an extended ISLM model with four quadrants - details of which I forget. The theorists seemed badly-educated and I'm sure a research project would back-up this hunch. Or that they were well-educated in maths, but not much else - maybe in getting 1950s american teaching jobs. They lived in a world of self-censorship during and after the McArthy era, teaching people who had learned things by heart at high school and were often at college for the sport or to avoid the draft or get better career prospects rather than study a subject. My professor was of that background and era. "We have to teach this stuff in order to call this an economics degree" was one of his memorable quotes. Another, Dr Johns I think, had to teach un-true theories of fiscal and monetary policy in a closed economy some days of the week, and opposite untrue theories of how world trade without tariffs would help third world countries on other days of the week. I don't know which economics teachers and which ones self-censored on subjects like a "public good", but I know the theory of a "public good" we were asked to study was worse than useless in discussing what the public sector should do, just as macro-economics of ignorant professors said nothing about how to re-build factories after government had wrecked them. I doubted their motives. Odd notes from my 20-odd self survive in the margin of a textbook and photocopied journal article about innovation. They are vitriolic. My main course notes do not survive; I probably burned them. For balance I should say that one student learned a lot from the course; it was possible to learn a lot from it, but the nature of introductory economics courses and trouble avoiding two of them in a row made me feel more ignorant about economics at the end of the core course than the beginning; it was as though economics teachers were there to prevent people learning economics. Talking of ignorance, someone asked Paul Samuelson for a theory that's true and not trivial. "Comparative advantage" was the reply, wrongly; it compares two countries without a welfare state, so that workers have the same minimum costs. Nineteenth-century Britain and Portugal. Looking at the Wikipedia link, you can see it used as an excuse to twiddle-about with maths and show deliberate ignorance of the different minimum costs of people making textiles in, say, Bolton and Bangladesh. There has never been a tariff on Bangladeshi textiles sold in Bolton, dispite currency fluctuations, export subsidies by the Bangladeshi government, and a disasterous set of policies there that lead to crowds of poor people scavanging after the few jobs in an export zone. A sane theory would build-in the needs of people on both sides, but no; it doesn't happen on the Wikipedia article. Taking another example, one Keele economics teacher told us the exact page on which Samuelson's textbook said there was no such thing as long-term involuntary unemployment. I think it was p.437 of the 1980s edition. A third example of ignorance: Samuelson's textbook is well known for contrasting command economies with free-market economies. I haven't read the textbook, but assume he says nothing about the mixed economies of Europe. A fourth example. Students nowadays expect to know about "open economy" macro-economics. The reason for that word is that they used to be taught "closed economy" macroeconomics, which has nothing to do with anything unless you are Woodrow Wilson in 1935, imports and exports are a small part of your economy's trade, and neighbouring countries are all folloing a similar policy. I was taught some set of graphs plotted on a cruciform, like the points of a compass, but labelled something like ISLM. It's very hard to remember when you know it to be un-true; like rehearsing an alabi. To make it worse, each untrue textbook has a slightly different version of the alabi. As a student of a short economics degree course, I know that textbook writers spread ignorance. If students were lucky, as I was, the other half-portion of degree in another subject and the side dishes like politics made-up for this study of ignorant grandees called economics. I don't remember bad lectures; nobody stood with their back to the lecture theartre and read-out slides. I remember good lectures on industrial history and the optional course on industrial innovation being good. The generation of teachers who taught at Keele had got the jobs against huge competion. Most of them are published authors with sold-out sections on Amazon and opinons on things like housing waiting lists or african poverty or -ologies and motorcycles that I would much rather have been taught. One book on economic decline and innovation was so good that pirated it . A 1980s student co-wrote something on the Guernsey banking system with one of them, apparently, and another student went-on to write The Price of Fish. Googling Keele Economics, I found a blog from an ex-teacher who gave-up the whole thing to become a rowing coach before writing a book - The Economy of the Word - and a blog with bits about economics teaching. I haven't read either book yet. There were also lectures on why there was not enough unemployment and enough industrial decline in the UK. Use a control+F and search for "cow theory" for more. I suppose the situation in 1984-7 was like the one that 20-odds find today, when they read Robert Peston about why their parents are out of business or redundant or worse.

          Digression on what's worse than being redundant

          If a few things go wrong in life at the same time, the effect multiplies rather than adds. That's not the multiplier of circulating money; that's the multiplier of stress and bad luck. Bad things include running-down a business or loosing a job - ideally one with a contract and redundancy. Worse things in business include going bust or bankrupt. Or, as an employee, a bullying dismissal dressed-up by crooks as sacking for misconduct, with no reference and a broken system of employment law and tribunals. Crooks are often public-funded, like Professor Piercy of Swansea University who found ways to pretend his colleagues had committed gross misconduct in order to remove them without a reference. Offspring of the redundant and the ceased-trading; the unfairly-dismissed and the gone-bust, go to economics courses with some kind of expectation. I sound a bit glum here. A lot of people leave jobs and become more themselves. They don't know how they stood it so long. Specially the un-paid bits of putting-up with the public or a heirachy or colleagues. But the sad thing is that a lot of people who want job security, or who want to do a good job for the customers, have to leave.
          When I went to college there were just a few pages of course information printed in a prospectus about each course, available to read free from reference libraries or to order by post. Most students would have been directed to them at school during A-level. I don't remember anyone trying to make sense of what the pages said. They said meaningless things like "quantitive methods", "micro" or "macro", so the course was taken on trust. Nobody mentioned that degree courses start again from the beginning, and that lots of people do courses not taught at school; I assumed that you study one subject at A-level and in more detail at degree level, which is how people in boarding school tend to think. It seems a reasonable assumption that there should be degrees for people who have done A-level; someone should provide one. More recently, a quango has had some funding to draft discussion points for the subject that it sometimes called "expectations" without any legal force beyond the sale of goods and services act if the course isn't described properly and offers something else, but they are default descussion settings for "those involved in the design, delivery, or review of programmes of study of economics", or "a prospective student or current student". I guess they're mainly used by external examinors. The points describe loose "threshold" and "typical" levels, which I imagine like the amber & green of a traffic light that you need to pass to get a degree. The implied sentences mean something like this

          ● Ignorance
          ● Familiarity / proficiency / competent use

          Benchmark standards for discussing UK economics degrees: the default settings

          1 ignorance / knowledge & understanding of economic concepts, principals & tools.

          2 ignorance / knowledge & understanding of distinctive economic theories, intepretations, modelling approaches & their competant use.

          3 ignorance / awareness & proficiency in quantitative methods & computing techniques appropriate to the programme of study, show an appreciation of the contexts in which these techniques and methods are relevant & how to use them effectively across a range of problems.

          4 ignorance / knowledge & understanding of sources and content of economic data & evidence, and appreciate what / and of those methods that might be appropriately applied to its analysis.

          5 ignorance / knowledge & understanding of how to apply economic reasoning to policy issues in a critical manner.

          6 ignorance / knowledge awareness & understanding of historical, political, institutional international, social, and environmental contexts in which specific economic analysis is applied.

          7 ignorance / knowledge in an appropriate number of specialised areas in economics as well as ignorance or an appreciation of the research literature in these areas.

          8  ignorance / awareness of & familiarity with the possibility that many economic problems may admit of more than one approach.

          The document doesn't mention social insurance. What if it did?

          9 Compulsory insurance-like services make-up about half the economy. State pensions, the NHS, Unemployment Pay and Job Seekers' Allowance, education, all free at the point of use.
          Economics, Development Studies History, Social Policy
          ● Familiarity
          ● Awareness
          ● Ignorance
          ● Ignorance
          ● Awareness
          ● Familiarity

          For working-age benefits, familiarity would include the need to forego insurance in order to compete for low-paid work in a non-compulsory system. Familiarity with the problem of imported products made by such people in countries without social insurance is important too, and the rapid population growth among the poor of those countries.

          Other topics could include the administrative cheapness of a universal benefit compared to the costs of a means-tested benefit or a privately-run benefit.Points 1-8 are accurate notes of QAA levels9 is added here. The system makes it possible to sell economics textbooks from Alabama to Bangladesh and West Virginia. Completely misleading concepts like "transfer payments" from rich to poor in a single year, or a slippery word "welfare" must be used in economics instead, followed by the idea of bad "protectionist tariffs" rather than good tariffs around a welfare state. Development of a country like Bangladesh has to be discussed in terms of not getting enough aid from the EU, rather than the need to introduce a welfare state in Bangladesh. If you study history or social policy, the opposite is true, and I believe the second group; I think economics teachers are trained to lie from the starts of their university careers.

          Positive and Normative economics are separate concepts, according to the textbook. Econmists argue about whichever one means social policy, and agree on whichever one is research data. That's what the textbook says at the start but by the end when it's tight for space in the last chapter about globalisation, it just lists what the authors think are good or bad arguments; acceptable or unaccepable, posh or not posh. As economics students we didn't get a chance to find out what other economics students thought, why we disagreed, and whether there was any evidence; we just faced the front and took notes about jargon phrases like "transfer payments".

          I studied History O and A level. The traffic lights are red for talk of "transfer payments" and green for Bismark's and then Lloyd George's national insurance scheme, successful enough that a jump to a national health service free at the point of delivery and more universal benefits were possible from 1948. A lot of history courses would mention the workhouse system, the tendency of "outdoor relief" or the "Speenhamland system" to need a lot of means-testing. There might be a reference to returing people to the parish of their birth by the cheapest transport and the idea that local workhouses needed to be basic in order not to attract people from the neighbouring union of poor law parishes, never-mind the working poor. A history course probably would't mention that any residential service is expensive, and therefore provided in a basic way, but these had to be very very basic, like a 1970s boarding school. Systems of temporary casual wards, and arbitary decisions about who was voluntarilly homeless, unemployed, or whatever, were built-in to the system and left to workhouse staff to administer. All of this was devised and debated by economists of the nineteenth century. Owen Chadwick was quoted as an example.

          A later generation noted vast over-population in inner cities, and wasn't quite sure what to do about out. Charitable donations were huge but poverty persisted, classified with words like "boderline semi-criminal" on Booth's map of London. Compulsory National Insurance began with private but compulsory schemes in 1911, as I think did the state pension. The word National is important, and was repeated in the title of the National Health Service in 1948. None of this appears to be known to economists; I repeat the point somewhere in this blog post while writing about Samualson's lie used to introduce the Public Good. 

          Economics introductory courses are nobbled

          There's a checkpoint at the wire fence between departments. You have to show your passport and your attitude is noted. The guard is probably an ex-student, treading snow to keep warm inside a greatcoat.
          "You are not from Maths? [ pause ] Purpose of visit?" "I am a student on a joint-honours degree". "Definitely not staff?". "Student". "You may pass. Your attitude will be noted if you mention history politics or social policy. Do not talk to the teachers. Do not use original sources. Original ideas will be marked wrong."
          That didn't happen. The building was built for subject mixers. Social science departments shared a long curved corridor, so the economics boss must have walked past other departments' notice boards and over-heard their students conversations, seen how they were taught through glass panels in the doors and seen what books they carried. Even the "proving the existence of fish" cartoon that was stuck to someone's door. So something in the tradition of teaching economics had such a hold over my professors' head that he ignored all evidence and taught misleading facts in a daft way. Oh and the formatting isn't working well today so this sentence has to go here: If you want a structured list of Kermit's lectures for revision:
          Talking of different departments, there is no guide to the UK constitution that's signed by the head of state, but UK politics departments try to be clear about UK social norms that are probably enforced by government and relate to ideas like democracy and human rights and may be spelt-out in hard-to-find documents from the Magna Carta to the Ministerial Code. Politics teachers are clear that the UK is a democracy, and that human rights are important, even if the Libyan regime has donated to their employer at LSE, their employer at Keele has an "internationalisation agenda", or there are a bunch of people from China or such sitting on the seats in the teaching room. Politics teachers are expected to know about the politics of at least one country, probably the one in which they teach, and describe where it differs from other countries. Economics teachers are not offered this clarity by their traditions of how to teach, nor asked for it in the job-ads I've seen, nor did they offer it to me as a students. The tradition of how to teach economics is recognisably the same in the least democratic states as in the most democractic states. The least democratic has little information online about the economics syllabus of its largest university, but the second least democratic state has a recognisable economics course. The good side of this is that there are jobs to be had in Damascus, where they pretend that it's a safe science that benefits the regime. The bad side is that it becomes a boring subject worldwide and worse than useless at describing the good and bad bits of different economies. If Swansea economics teachers have some students - maybe from Port Talbot - asking about dumped steel from China, and students from China on a special deal promoted by central government and Professer Piercy, do they talk about different costs of welfare states compared to sweatshop states with no right to complain or vote? No. Correct me if I am wrong. I would like to say that the Damascus University Web Site illustrates my point by showing that more safe subjects like science are taught than dangerous subjects like politics; that both timetables try to look technocratic and scientific, and that the system favours economics. I would like to say that the courses are described in an opaque way, so that a greater proportion of students go on the wrong course, but there is less trouble from the authorities. I would be bluffing; I don't understand what I'm looking at at the University of Damascus web site, but there is postgraduate teaching of economics described in English and the headings do look quite technical. There are undergraduate department pages for Economics and Politics in Arabic. Cut and paste the urls into Google and click "translate this page" to try to see what's up but it looks as though teaching has been suspended. University of Damascus postgraduate course titles are as opaque as Fishman's timetable. "Quantitative Methods" don't make sense. Like a course in "Muscular Movements" or "Academic Studies". They could be designed to divert attention from police, the people they've arrested and forced to give names, attention from ministers, and party activists who might look for something to complain about or cause trouble. I think these failures of human rights are the biggest dis-incentive to good teaching, but there is no list of the worst countries for human rights online. There are lists of the least democratic countries, so I will take that as the same kind of nasty thing. On a scale of nastiness, Damascus is near the nasty end but the University of Boulder, Colorado was known for constructed dismissals and fake allegations aimed at anyone politically active, followed by the odd summons to a McArthy-like Senate Committee. Colorado was where Fishman learned his trade as an economics professor.

          Department Master degree Ph.D.

          Accounting Accounting
          Auditing Auditing
          Business Administration

          Business Administration Business Administration
          Marketing Marketing

          Fiscal and Monetary Economy Fiscal and Monetary Economy
          Economy Economy
          Applied Statistics Quantitative Methods Quantitative Methods
          Banks and insurance

          Financial Markets Financial Markets
          Banking and Finance Banking and Finance
          Undergraduate courses are less clear and probably suspended - quite likely because they don't get you out of conscription any more if you live near Domascus, and there would be no other point in going on them.

          Why UK economics courses forget the 1980s mess-up

          The first graph says it - page 440, figure 19.2, from the Begg textbook. This was a policy borne of new radical economic advice to a new pugnatious government. Economists aren't going to admit how spectacularly they messed-up, are they? They tend to say something like "the financial services sector is more important than manufacturing in the UK economy", rather than "stupid economists and politicians killed-off most of manufacturing in the UK".

          data & evidence

          Benchmark standards for economics degrees suggest " knowledge & understanding of sources and content of economic data & evidence, and appreciate what / and of those methods that might be appropriately applied to its analysis. "

          The Central Office of Information does not release a lot of the data you'd want - just aggregated data for demand management. Some data about government intentions was published in "The Red Book" according to one lecture, but I asked in Chiswick Reference Library and was told that it isn't on the library index as "The Red Book". It was harder to find data before the internet and easier to cover-up facts from people who don't want to know them. There were other references in handouts to "UNISTATS", but I never discovered how to find a unistat. And the Central Office of Information statistics were kept well hidden.

          An odd thing about the Chicago School of economics is that those economists did not look out of the window at the rust belt. They don't use the window for data and evidence. I expect there were parked cars or turf and footpaths outside the windows where economists taught, but they'd see more on their commutes. They would not be much aware of whether Chicago's state of Illinois had better social insurance systems than where rival imports came-from in Japan or Korea or China, raising costs and requiring some kind of subtle conditional tariff protection, but that again is the fault of Chicago economists for not putting that point on the course. An odd thing about UK economists is that they do not look at the back of their gran's kitchen cupboard. There they will find a perfectly good casserole dish and kitchen implements made in the UK up to a certain date. If they are interested in cars or computers, there is similar evidence of how good an MG car is, or the Acorn computer. The sudden lack of data after the 1980s is a bit like the lack of data about dinosaurs after a certain date; the absence suggests a disaster. Economists do not generally look out of the window, or in the back of their gran's kitchen cupboard, or in old computer magazines, so I don't think they are up to the benchmark standard for marking economics degree papers.

          historical context: UK PPE courses

          If anyone has ever researched the education of UK shadow chancellors - the ones who have to reach around for an alternative policy - I expect they'd find a lot of oxbridge graduates who know people who have done PPE even if they have not done PPE themselves. They have done a cut-down course rather like the one at Keele. Whatever they studied, it hasn't helped the UK economy do good things as much as other economies.

          historical context: UK colleges

          The more mundane the college, the more fantastical the job adds, specially for the head of department. I haven't tested this theory, but if you take Barnsley College as the worst reviewed college on Unistats, and if you find one of their job ads, it will probably ask for miracles in a few sentences and then write about the college itself for pages.

          The less likely the graduates to get senior jobs, the more "management" is written into departmental titles - just to embarass graduates and make them feel like failures, while discouraging any applicants who prefer "industrial relations" or "work relations" as a title. League tables of best and worst degrees for getting a job list "management science" nearer the bottom of the list than the top.

          A sensible job ad would ask for someone to find out what teachers want to teach and what students want to learn, then cobble-together the best available compromise and describe it as honestly as possibly on the prospectus, with a warning that it isn't a career-enhancing course if that's otherwise implied.

          A problem is that applicants are nearly all former teachers with a second degree and some published work in economics journals, who have been given various career-breaks in similar jobs like being allowed to teach an interesting course. They are goodie-goodies. I don't know how to get-around this problem, but it is not by writing a fantastical job ad.

          The fantastical approach is to ask for world-class ways of filling vacant places by bringing-in students from all over the world to learn the same thing that's in textbooks all over the world. No wonder the con-man Professor Piercy managed to land a job at Swansea Uni.
          Keele Management School is seeking [sic] to appoint an outstanding academic at Senior Lecturer level specialising in the area of Economics. The successful applicant will already have a national or international research profile, have contributed to curriculum development and teaching in the subject area and will demonstrate a proven ability to attract external research funding and of providing academic leadership and management. The Management School has been identified as a strategically important area of development within the University and the successful candidate will have a significant opportunity to help shape this development. The individual appointed will play an active role in the School's research, teaching and enterprise activities and will contribute to the continuing development of the School profile at home and overseas. They will contribute leadership by undertaking research of national and international quality, contributing to the development and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and will engage with the School's globalisation and anti welfare state internationalisation and enterprise engagement agendas. We encourage applications in all areas of economics but are particularly interested to hear from candidates with strengths in the areas of Macroeconomics and/or International Money and Finance.
          The add should be compared with the experience of Keele University in hiring Les Fishman, or Cardiff University in hiring Patrick Minford, or even Swansea University in falling for a con man called Professor Piercy. I remember Fishman as decent person except in those parts of his life that related to me, like doing his job. Slightly funny, capable of the odd off-the-wall thought, decent enough if in business I guess. Good enough at everything but his job and, in fairness, good at parts of that, like interrupting himself mid-lecture for effect, or talking slowly, or not expelling some student like myself who a tutor thought had "attitude". Much better than Piercy who would end-up in court if he was self-employed but does well in a large organisation: nasty and nepotistic with dishonest ways of expelling colleagues. Such a person would never risk an original thought passing their lips unless tactical, and would have trouble getting an honest job. Comments on Piercy reached the Welsh assembly and welsh newspapers, happening at the same time that Swansea University had trouble filling its student places.

          The Keele advert did not attract Piercy.
          How to make sure the next one doesn't?
          1. This add does not mention an ability to run tutorials.

            A tutor with bad ideas
            ...can simply stand at one end of the room and talk rubbish.
            (Historians will know the pattern from other jobs Bourbon God King.)

            If someone asks why the Servis washing machine factory has closed, they can simply lie, as Fishman did (and I expect a Bourbon God King would do).

            A teacher who has no idea what students have already studied at A-level can get a job too, even if unwilling to learn and fit teaching to the needs of UK students. That's an example of what you don't learn-about if you don't sit close to the students while teaching (or what a bourbon doesn't learn by not working with parliaments).

            If events force this teacher back into teaching, then you know from the rest of this page what happens. In happier times, the person is more likely to create a job that doesn't involve teaching - in itinery of corporate plans and overseas recruitment visits, of meetings about meetings and attempts to make the taxpayer pay more and more grants. All of this distracts the other teachers from their jobs; from my own experience in social work quangos, staff are forced into rooms to have meetings and listen to all this. The result is a department that runs more smoothly when the boss is away, a taxpayer with a huge bill and a student who sees a lecturer from a distance.

            A tutor with good ideas
            ,,,who wants to work with groups of students and help them solve problems is not lured-in. Here is one who left, for the same reason. (I took the same quote further up the page but this blog post rambles and I doubt many people read the whole thing - anyway I haven't read to the end of the bit it's quoted from; this is all I know)

            "When I started teaching in the Keele Economics Department in the early 1980s almost half my teaching load was given over to a group of 8 students over the whole year, who attended a two hour problem-solving workshop and one of three tutorial groups of 6 students, besides attending three weekly lectures (at the time all degrees were joint, which had been a Keele innovation). The last time I taught the first year class in 2000, I was allocated the entire year over one semester, divided up into classes of 25 students for one hour a week. The class size had tripled, and the contact time cut to a third" - Tribe

            A teacher who wants to teach like this would not be attracted, I guess, by most of the ads for economics professors. They would do better finding some other way to teach, far better, at far less cost to taxpayers and students.

            Maybe students should keep tabs on the worst job-ads for professors.

          2. The add does not mention social insurance.

            Talking of UK students, or EU students, one of the main things that European governments do is social insurance, but US economics text books censor it and UK ones follow.

            Anyone going on an american-style course to find out how much cheaper universal benefits are than means-tested benefits, which countries use a fund to finance benefits compared to countries that use the current account - would be disappointed. It's an economic issue on the news but not in the textbooks.
            There are a couple of decoys just to annoy. One is a specialisation called "welfare economics", but that's about something else of little interest till right at the end of the course; it starts with the usual stuff about walruses and doesn't mention social insurance systems as far as I can tell. The other decoy is the loaded phrase "transfer payments" which assumes all public spending to be out of a current account; it is ignorant of the idea of insurance or investment for the future by one generation in order to pay its own costs efficiently later-on.

            I guess that colleges do not want to upset their funders, if they are a state-funded college in the USA or India where state benefits are rare. Nor incoming students from other countries if the college is in the UK. So awkward problems like the trade between a country without welfare rights or even human rights are glossed-over to suit college management and deny students a good course.
          3. The add does not mention globalisation, except to approve

            Robert Peston's book mentions the strange nature of low-pay countries exporting their savings to fund the debt of high-pay countries, which have massive personal debts and government deficits. There are also massive flows of manufactured goods like textiles, from low-pay countries to high-pay countries. I think some of the reasons for this are that there is a benefits system in a lot of the high-pay countries, making their goods more expensive even if made in a more mechanised ingenious way. That gives an unfair advantage to people in low-pay countries which their governments are scared to give-up, even if a change would be massively better for the people of Rana Plaza or Quatar or China. At the same time, government people in these countries are in a good position to invest money in Swiss bank accounts or international markets generally, lowering the value of currencies like the Chinese one against the value of Sterling or the Euro.

            There is a decoy just to annoy. The job ad wants this new lecturer to help suck-in students from all over the world to study, which seems a bad idea because they miss a chance to study their home economies. As a result, there are some dangers.

            • Firstly, of teaching about a kind of standardised mid-atlantic economy which doesn't exist, rather than the UK economy if the course is in the UK. Economies that don't exist don't attract local 18-year-olds to come and study. They attract people who wonder-in by default, as 18 year-olds tend to do.
            • Secondly, self-censorship about the worlds' problems because students from whatever part of the world are embarrassed by differences in social insurance, human rights, dumping, democracy, or anything that might be slightly embarrassing to say if there is an awkward mixed group of students from all over the world meeting awkwardly to face a tutor, who tries not to feel awkward. The tutor in turn could be on an insecure contract and want good student feedback, or pick-up teaching habits from that part of their career to use later.
            If an economics lecturer can't lecture about subjects on the news or in Robert Peston, they're unlikely to provide the education their students wish to receive. That could be why there are vacant spaces to fill and the college management has an "internationalisation agenda" to fill the spaces, but managers don't see it that way.

          historical context: US colleges

          Much of the economic analysis from the USA - the hiring of economists, the editing of journals in the journal ranking lists, the writing of syllabuses, and the ordering of textbooks to suit the courses, is done at colleges like this one: One thing clearly known about these courses is that they don't mention social insurance systems from the National Insurance Act to the Beveridge Report, more National Insurance Acts, the NHS and similar histories in some other countries. It's considered controversial in the US, so textbooks used in other countries keep quiet too, with consequent opinions about poverty in sweatshop countries, over-population there, and floods of under-priced imports competing with products in the UK. All these opinions are made in ignorance and given as though scientific. The main reason someone would sign-up for such an awful patronising conformist course, I think, is do avoid the draft. When the alternative is to become a squaddie and face the Viet Con, courses like Business Administration suddenly become interesting. The second reason is to pretend it is a good course and bluff employers into offering jobs. In a boom, this might work; there is an email list that lists short term job opportunities at management consultancies to UCLA graduates to me every day or two until I learn how to unsubscribe. The third reason is that state governments lured school leavers into adult education with sports facilities and fraternities that I guess are not available unless you are a student. One reason someone would teach such an awful patronising conformist course, I think, is to avoid the McArthy Committee, and the stiffing sense of conformity that it would bring to US colleges that survives generations later. I read somewhere that High-school and university students compete with each other to show that they conform to the teachers' opinion, and only a proportion can get the good grades that allow them a chance of further study - if they pay for it - while working as teaching assistants and talking to undergraduate students in revision classes. )I asked someone from the states if high school was still like this in the 20-teens and she said that sometimes it is - it depends on the school. Now back to 1955...) Other students don't mind repetative teaching of the X-shaped diagram under different labels over-and-over again, because they want an easy course. Below this box and before the next heading you will see a video of a glove puppet explaining the letter "X". This link explains the number "9". The grand professor doesn't have to talk to students; there is nothing that he can be blamed for. One article dispairs of postwar undergraduate teaching in the USA. , blaming pressure to attract students. Another - a powerpoint promotion by Colorado University Economics Department about itself - states something similar while praising something called Zubrow, which is a brand of professor: "I choose economics because the building was closest to my fraternity...I stayed in economics because I had Zubrow. - James Farquhar BA 1986". I expect the powerpoint is shown to background music while it goes-on to say when they changed each light bulb in the department and how great the star professors are. Textbook publishers have to sell to Zubrow. The first textbooks promoting Keynsian textbooks led to boycotts by college funders. The next - Samuelson - took a more dispassionate and neutral tone and managed to get on the book lists by pretending to be scientific. A textbook that mentioned national insurance or the NHS would have less chance, I suppose, and so its UK edition would therefore probably not mention them either. Economics journals prove my point. I can say this without reading them. The jargon phrase used by protesters was "military industrial complex". If you search the top economics journal on the Keele list using Google Scholar, you'll see that it only crops-up 15 times; they didn't like to publish that sort of thing. If you search Wikipedia for peace of Vietnam songs, you will find a page title. If you type "military industrial complex" into a song lyric search engine, you'll even find it there. I don't know what it rhymes with, but it's there. Anywhere but on the economics course. Another test and another anecdote. In my first year at Keele - I met someone who politely asked me about my economic views. He was an older boy who had turned-up a week late at Gaysoc, the student union group that met in the first week of each year so that gay people could recognise each other. In ignorance, I only turned-up to the second or third meeting. Just me, this social work student, and the odd cartoon character.

          "You must admit", my new acquaintance said, "monopoly capitalism is pretty inefficient way to run anything, isn't it?". "Yes", I said, thinking I sort of knew what the words meant but that my education at boarding schools and from reading The Times had not prepared me for this. By the end of the economics course I was no wiser. That's odd because I guess the idea has something to do with Marx (Durkheim was more interesting according to a teacher on the Foundation Year lectures, but I read neither), and Marx came-up on the fringe of my other subject, English. Some people use Marx to provide a cheat-sheet checklist of things to say about a novel if they can't think of their own ideas, which is what you have to do to earn your student grant or be an academic; you have to think of something to say; Marx provides a checklist, like an economic model.

          At Keele people have to be quite good at thinking of their own things to say because there is no time to study what one book says about another book. Keele students are like Captain Mainwaring ; "no time for all that red tape: we have to use our initiative", with Sargeant Wilson as tutor "are you sure that's altogether wise?"

          There's a free promp on the campus that suggests ideas. The old building is an economic model. It was built for a coal-mine owning family, with a floor plan the size of a hotel, while the miners' housing has fewer square meters per house. You could fit a street of the mining villiage into the the coal mine owner's grand building. On an economics course, this should suggest to students that market forces didn't work very well; there was a glut of coal-miners or a shortage of coal-investers, and barriers to miners who wanted to become investers.


          My other joint honours course was English Literature, which I hadn't done before. It started like a book-club, in the hope that students would find something to say about the week's novel. Similar foundation year courses sometimes failed: it would turn-out that not a single student had read the novel, and the tutor had to talk about it for the whole hour. I think that only happened twice in my foundation year, and never too obviously in the main degree course which was more in demand. Among that proper joint-honours students there were usually a few who had read at least half of the book and we found enough to say without an extra course called "finding something to say: official critical apparatus for eng. lit. students".

          I heard one student from an early tutorial tell the tutor that she had more attention from staff at sixth-form college than at uni. He said it was maybe to do with the cuts. I had some messy pointless reason to talk to a tutor in English once, and he said "I'll have a think and you have a think" while walking down stairs and into a private room. I met some odd person who had heard of the Keele English course and said that it repeated A-level a lot and was old-fashioned.

          I was just amazed to be allowed-in. The amazement lasted at least a year and I was still interested in year three. I was paid £3,000 a year to sit once a week among people with big hair and long names discussing Jane Austin and then find myself tricked into learning some theory without knowing it and writing about any darn thing I wanted. I think the English staff had had the same problems as the Economics staff in avoiding the repetition of A-level and finding new things to teach in a sausage machine, but somehow solved the problem because it was a more sought-after subject and had no un-squash-able core, and expectations were very soft. If anyone was the person who had to be taught because of the foundation year and clearing and commitment to subject-switching, it was me. I think I detected that when asking to study English. The tutor even asked me about things like spelling, and I said it didn't matter, and he checked with his boss, and no: it didn't.

          I wrote about the role of the narrator, the book's strange relationship to the reality of readers' lives, and something else came to mind each time, so that was three themes per essay. I read the beginnings and the ends of each book, the preface, and the middles of the ones I did for essays: one a month, also revised for exams. The first year courses were "Augustans and Romantics", leaning on excerpts from an anthology "Augustans", I guess, and another called "Romantic Poetry and Prose". The next course was "Victorian Literature", which is OK if your teachers allow you to say what you dislike about it as well as what you like. One of my essay-and-exam-revision subjects was Thomas Hardy, who confuses women and fruit. I am no good at heterosexual flirting, but I think Thomas Hardy would have been worse. He gave up the whole writing-thing after world war one when somehow life seemed diferent, for reasons I could probably once list in essays.

          In the final year the department offered a lit-crit-kit from Roland Barthes, and compared with a very British writer on similar subjects - Dick Hebdidge - for perspective, and wrote a long essay which I had to stop half way through but would have been very clever and wry if complete. Somehow I passed the exams and still look back on it as fun at the time and worth doing.

          I tend to remember third year tutors more than others, for some reason. Maybe I had the same tutor two years in a row. Mine now works at York Uni.


          A more through piece of research about economics tracks the amount of ticky-tacky in journal articles, specially algrebra, and finds a great increase in the 50s - 80s alongside emigration of US economics lecturers around the world. (Brackhouse Middleton and Tribe, 1997) . A third article states that theoretical articles peaked around the mid 80s when researchers got their computers, but I can't find the reference. (Somebody, 2000s-ish)

          historical context: UK newspapers

          Their positions are well known; I remember that The Times changed a lot under Murdoch in the 1980s, and the government PR machine was ruthless in talking about the world as seen by newspapers rather than the world in the tables of stats or outside the window, so the collapse of UK manufacturing somehow got reported by changing the subject to some metaphor or other like "taking-on the unions" or muddled facts like "world recession". I remember an article which I thought was typical. It said "Happy Good Quote Minister" bla bla minister of employment Norman Fowler soundbite bla bla.
          • Blob. Fact contradicts Norman Fowler fact fact fact fact - this is a technical small bit with less of an editorial line".
          Later-on, The Times never quite admitted that a UK generation and their dads had lost-out, or not in the bigger articles, but did show a picture of graduates at Trinity College Dublin, writing that nearly every single one had emigrated during the 1980s. When Geoffrey Howe, 1980s chancellor, got an obituary he was quoted as writing wonderful successful budgets until an entirely unrelated tiff about the price of sterling caused him to resign from the cabinet. You could see that there was something wrong with The Times under Murdoch.

          historical context: failure in one area puts up house prices in another

          Add to that the patchwork of how people live on a map of the UK. Manufacturing was mainly north and midlands, with bits around London and inner cities. A policy that killed manufacturing made Londoners a lot better-off because property values shot-up when everyone in the rest of the UK tried to get service jobs. Every newspaper editor, MP or even some journalists who owned property near London did very very well, because a lot of service jobs were based in the South East. So they thought the economy was doing well under Thatcher and Blair too. I guess that members of the new Monetary Policy Committee that discussed the thing under Blair and Brown and Cameron had a lot of property in the South East too, so something in their gut feelings said: "things are going well".

          historical context: things got worse since my 1980s degree

          The degree which I started by saying was bad - in a question on Quora I think - turns out to be better than most; Professor Fishman, his colleagues, and the demands of a short course for a lot of people all made it less mathematical than most. He even allowed colleagues to teach about economic institutions failing - just like Robert Peston and authors like that. Apparently it is called "Institutional Economics" and is rare. I might have witnessed a golden age of economics teaching at its peak. The British Economic Crisis book was written by someone on the staff, The Price of Fish was written by an ex-student, and a staff member worked with an ex-student to write about the Guernsey financial system and then tax havens. Another wrote early input-output tables for Staffordshire and work on water poverty. Google tells me that Keele economics graduates have gone-on to be lay members of some kind of governing council, and done some impressive other jobs as well. The number of economics students who think their teachers haven't got the right idea has risen, I guess from sites like Post Crash Economics and points of view from teachers, who say "What problem?", or use the "Because I say so" argument to state that economics is a very mathematical subject. Courses like the one at London School of Economics require no A-level in economics, but a couple of A-levels in maths, just in case any student will (a) program stats software for another generation with their maths knowledge, and (b) have the right nous and facts available to put into the software, after studying maths and one other A level which is likely to be related because the applicant got good A-level grades: maybe "maths called something else (MCSE) A level". Not history for example. If they'd wanted to do mixed subjects, the current pressure on schools to show good results would have prevented them. A member of school staff would have refused any application to study history and economics at the school in case it lowered their grades on the league table.

          Digression on whether mathematical economists are right: use control:F for mathematical economists

          Digression on wanting to do economics

          I also want to do this because my own run-down business is threatened by economists and interest groups. The aid trade and free-traders agree that dumping from Bangladesh is a good thing for those in Rochdale and those in Rana Plaza. I don't agree. The fashion PR industry agrees that London Fashion Week and their idea of the Fashion Industry earns 35bn for the UK economy, and paid Oxford Economics to produce a document to say so. I want to prove a different view.

          Why British manufacturers under-invested, except Morris who under-invested

          Mr Morris, Lord Nuffield, was a bicycle repair boy, businessman, and car manufacturer who ran a thifty factory. He benefited from a long career as he rode a bike for health and left school at the legal minimum age. His brands were MG, for Morris Garage, and Morris. He's quoted as saying "keep the walls bulging", meaning "keep doing things in thrifty ways".He was also fairly consitent with his suppliers, helping firms like Lucas and the forgettably named Borg Warner who made steering stuff, Skip-down to the heading "Mr Morris of Morris Motors was different." a page or two down, if you want to see why this story about car factories overlaps with education. During the 70s, a large proportion of people worked in manufacturing but it was hard to report in newspapers. Journalists decided to take car manufacturing as a kind of model for other industries, because all of us can glance at a car on the road and see if the bottoms of the doors are rusty or the design looks bad. Economics overlapped more with manufacturing in those days, and economic journalism overlapped a lot more with motoring journalism. I don't know when Mr Morris left the company before his death in 1964, but when Minis sold well in I think the early 70s, the people at British Leyland ordered another mini production line exactly like the first in order to boost production alongside. That's from a book called "Why are the British bad at Manufacturing?" which was a common worry at the time. When the market moved towards sales reps buying company cars for motorways and commuting, some Leyland models had a 2 foot gear lever to give drivers enough leverage to move the Austin Gypsy gear box; the company was good at ordering sheet metal boxes with no need for a girder chassis and putting existing components into them, but bad at developing new engines and gearboxes and the rest. They obtained those by merger with companies that already had them, like Triumph that had some kind of decent gear box but no sheet metal chassis. They hadn't the nous to develop machines cheaply, as Formula 1 teams do, nor the money to do hundreds of expensive experiments and get better machines by sheer trial and error. Recent news about car factories fiddling the EU emissions standards show that car development costs are still a problem; they weren't just a problem for Leyland. The British public were another problem - whether working for car companies and choosing the designs, or buying cars and choosing the designs, the result from all UK car factories was moulded sewing on the door trims and printed wood-grain on the dashboard with silver paint round the edge. It was an odd combination of good design and bad design. I'm not sure of the faults model-by-model, but the false economies of factory design were similar to false economies in product product design and quality. The thing like a bike chain that linked the top of the engine to the bottom would rattle when it became loose: you can hear whether a car is a British Leyland model before you see it. When customers asked for cars in different colours and styles, the Oxford factory didn't devise a way of making them to order as James May has shown the current mini factory does; I suppose they made them in batches and just hoped that their dealers could keep enough variations in stock. I don't know any facts to support this hunch, but re-reading the "British Industrial Crisis" book I see that there were vast stocks kept at UK factories for reasons like this; their machines were hard to set-up for small batches and making things-up as they went along was out of the question. There's also a quote about pounds per worker shown as capital in UK manufacturing firms, which is under a fifth of what showed in Japanese firms at the time. Some of the investment might not have shown because of accounting conventions, but at a time of new motorway-using customers, new sheet metal chassis designs, and new demands for fuel efficiency, this written-off capital probably wasn't so important as the new stuff that was on the books and easy to measure.

          Table 22. International comparison of assets per employee, 1976

          Assets (k)/employee
          Motor industry
          British Leyland                 8,505
          11 Japanese firms [average]    42,020

          Assets (k)/employee Electrical engineering
          GEC     (UK)                    9,725
          Siemens (Germany)              16,479
          Hitachi (Japan)                34,680

          Source: F. E. Jones, 'Our Manufacturing Industry — the Missing £100,000 Million' Nat. West. Bank Quarterly Review, May 1978, pp. 8-17.

          My hunch is that factories under-invested because there was less and less land available for factories, because the government allowed free trade from dumping exporters in Bangladesh, because banks were less and less keen to lend, and because families tended to send their offspring to expensive and counter-productive education systems, particularly the 10-year boarding-school system which is both. I know something about the result of under-investing in factories from my own business. The result is a room full of basic machines that are designed not to wear-out quickly; the most important thing they do is not wear-out half-way through a job. I try to find suppliers who have this stuff and invest even less. The second most important thing the machines do is make stuff, in so far as a press or a knife or a mould can, but the output possible from a highly skilled worker is nothing special.
          Digressions stuck together For context, I should say that my own shoe business runs with piles of inventory to support minimum batch sizes for free setup and delivery, and that my mum and dad's old Ford Cortina had a gear lever that came-off by mistake at one point, revealing a hole through to the tarmac down below. The Cortina shared a lack of undercoat or rustless panels with the equivalent Morris Marina from British Leyland. Come the recession, we had to go to adult education classes at Chiswick Comprehensive to try to coax a few years' more life out of the thing, learning how to use elastic plastic padding, Venetian Red spray, and T-cut to try and restore rust holes - even on the bonnet. Fake sewing was standard too, as well as poo or vomit coloured browns and a little printed woodgrain on the plastic, with silver-paint highlights. Ford and Vauxhall were not much better than British Leyland, which was used by newspapers as an emblem for what was happening at a lot of other UK factories. I read somewhere that the idea of staff working as unionised teams who would bid for wages by striking was more of a ship-building problem than a car-building problem, but newspapers reported strikes in car factories because newspaper readers could see the factory products driving-around so car factories were a better emblem. While googling this blog post, I discover that ICI and Servis Washing Machines used early computer systems or similar to keep the job tickets flowing round their factories, so not all UK factories were under-invested just as not all UK products were bad.
          Usually, owner-managed firms under-invested in order to pay 10 years' boarding school fees to make their offspring useful to the business, without success. I have no figures to back this up but ask your granny if you are posh. Usually, larger firms under-invested to please the stock market's need for short term results at the expense of long-term investments. Paternalistic pension law for private pensions had channelled a lot of peoples' savings, but not their voting rights, into managed stock market funds run by pension companies. Someone who worked for a big firm might well pay for shares in the same firm, but the voting rights would be used against that person's interests by calling for short term profit and nothing else. Worse still, someone in a medium-sized firm that ran its own pension company might be forced to invest pension contributions in this same company but have no control over the business when it went bust owing money to the pension fund. Unions made no effort to find a solution to this problem; it still isn't solved.

          Mr Morris of Morris Motors was different.

          Mr Morris, Lord Nuffield, under-invested in car factories in order to better educate the entire UK population through the Nuffield Foundation. If economics and science teachers had paid more attention to the Nuffield Foundation and ways of teaching technical subjects from students' own observations, then there would have been a workforce ready to work at MG or British Leyland as easily as they could move to jobs like finance and engineering and factory management. The gist of my Nuffield Physics A level had been to learn from experiment as some of us learn from looking at a bicycle. Mathmatical statements were as carefully edited for clarity as sentences in the textbook, and most were obvious from experiment anyway. The syllabus used wave-motion as a theme to teach capacitors, springs, and water waves, so that it was easy to do three at once. The course used microwaves and special-size ping pong balls to help us discover nuclear physics. I think there were Nuffield Foundation books as well, with a similar graphic style to the one above but no pictures. I was lucky and got a good teacher so we didn't have to use text books much. If the system had been taken-up more widely, there would be no need to invest huge amounts in research and development; car factory staff at Moris would simply sort out the problems from nous. Unfortunately the Nuffield Foundation passed control of its syllabuses to Edexel a few years ago, but the ideas might remain and they might be persuaded to work with other universities or the more obscure A level exam boards, which I guess are based in Wales and Northern Ireland. The Nuffield Foundation paid £20,000 to help set-up the short loans section of Keele library for groups of people who all wanted short-term access to books at the same time. If the Keele Economics department had asked dozens of students all to read a chaptor of Keynes in the same week, dozens of copies could have been bought and lent-out. The library was a few hundred meters from Keele economics department. Unfortunately, teachers didn't keep-up with Mr Morris and his Nuffield Foundation; they were still teaching science from theory and overly-repeated algebra when I studied economics in 1984, the year British Leyland dropped the Morris brand. We still learned Keynes from a textbook instead of every student borrowing a copy of Keynes for a week from the library. The Nuffield Foundation outlives Morris and British Leyland, and funded an A-level syllabus called "Economics and Business" which ran for a few years from the 1990s, with some help from teachers at Staffordshire University. Control was taken by Edexcel a few years ago. I imagine that the two smaller exam boards would run a similar A-level with help from the Nuffield Foundation, or a group of university staff and activists, if the three main boards no longer run anything good. Two smaller Welsh and Northern Irish boards are protected form London political interference by fear in London of Belfast and Cardiff political interference. Their main worries are their percieved fixed minimum costs of running an exam, and other's fixed minimum costs of writing a textbook or such. For example the Northern Ireland board's music exam doesn't have a textbook published to go with it. So there is still scope for writing a good economics degree syllabus that follows a good economics a-level syllabus; the difficulties are doing the work of writing a good A-level syllabus, and persuading those who pass the A-level to follow it with a degree. I expect the university that ran the degree would have to run coaching sessions or some special course to take the a-level for those who otherwise lacked the right knowledge. "Nuffield Economics & Business courses sought to introduce both subjects by examining familiar situations, allowing students to develop an understanding of the ideas that can be used to make sense of what is happening around them. Concepts were always introduced in context."

          If an economics professor won't profess about recession, should they retire?
          Definitely agree
          Mostly agree
          Neither agree nor disagree
          Mostly disagree
          Definitely disagree
          Obituaries in national newspapers should be published

          The teaching on my course II

          are good at explaining things
          have made the subject interesting
          are enthusiastic about what they are teaching
          The course is...
          intellectually stimulating
          - National Student Survey


          good at explaining things
          <THE NORMAL BIT>
          There's a pattern on unistats. Staff are usually good at explaining things; they do their job pretty well as at Keele. Keele short courses are a career-trap for teachers. It's hard to move-on from teaching them and teachers stay with the patience of elephants, sometimes scoring 100% for explaining things. I remember some of them quite funny, even about the micro-economics of indifference curves.

          I don't remember any lectures where lecturers read stuff off slides or classes where staff weren't engaged. A lot of them were published authors. I remember snatches of stuff about input-output and something-iev cycles that were interesting because applied to a purpose, and not applied as a maths excercise.

          Staff were good when allowed to run tutorials and teach relevant subjects as well. One that I got in year three wrote such a good book that I've pirated it; nothing like it would have been available at other colleges.
          </THE NORMAL BIT>
          made the subject interesting ...
          enthusiastic about what?
          When a subject is beyond hope, the best thing to do is to say so. At the University of Maryland in the 1950s, people on craft courses from jewellery to puppetry had to sign-up for the Department of Home Economics. Early film of Kermit the Frog, the economics-teaching puppet who graduated about that time, show him listening to a home economics lecturer who might have given him some ideas. "Yup: that's the whole salad bowl" is a Kermit phrase.

          At 1980s Keele I remember a teacher saying "Under-whelming, isn't it?", which was funny, and "it's nothing earth-shattering", while the chief came-up with "We have to teach this stuff, in order to call this an economics course". At Glasgow in the 20-teens teachers are reported as saying, if asked, that a theory is "not particularly illuminating".

          There was a problem with the classes and lectures, which is that they were not related to a textbook that I remember, and the reason for remembering is that the class and the textbook said different things in year two macro-economics. Diagrams like figure 20.6 below were from journal articles and 1970s textbooks like Samuelson and Lipsey I suppose. It would have been good to know which one, because the course textbook - Begg, 1984 - glosses over the subject very quickly and then explains why the ISLM theory isn't really true. I doubt the person teaching the course knew what textbook we'd bought or that the person who prescribed the textbook knew that it said something different to the course.

          When the subject got "intellectually stimulating", meaning one problem-solving course, it was great. Feedback from one teacher who tried modelling an aging population and pension costs was that his course "was the last thing students wanted to learn", but the method and idea of teaching that way was fine.
          course is intellectually stimulating

          Not many people looked stimulated by manual computation of statistics and a range of classic rules of thumb, followed by a modelling excercise that meant a kind of bathroom floor-plan that was meant to describe graphs we were not allowed to research or discuss.

          I wish that tutors had been allowed to set-up shop by themselves and teach what they wanted to teach, in hope of people like me deciding that it was what I wanted to study, so that both sides could get something out of the deal if there was any common ground.

          It didn't get any more stilulating in year two, with the macro-economics course building-up to a modelling excercise, in which some of the rules-of-thumb were combined for exam-passing purposes in an artificial and complicated-looking way. The kind of thing you uderstand for a few months before or after an exam. Except to stimulate anger, because there was a real important subject that coud have been taught instead: the anger lasts longer.

          Apparently the "i" on the graph stands for "interest" not "income", which I had forgotten. It doesn't much matter for the exam, which is mainly about moving the lines about on a page and the charting skills that go with it, like someone drawing a new floor plan for the bathroom. It's possible that I was taught the Mundell-Fleming model, which allows for international trade, or not. I just picked the most familiar diagram from an image search of "four quadrant ISLM".

          If you do that search, you'll see that two different things are taught together.

          • One is a charting ability, for which this is the final show-off for something like school parents' day or an exam. Combining a few rules-of-thumb into a two dimensional model, just to show that it can be done.
          • Another is some kind of post-truth algebra about how the economy is meant to work, defining the curves, and invented by professors.
          This course is meant to be about trade, but which nobody is likely to remember for very long after the exam and doesn't refer to real numbers from the office of national statistics.
          Nowhere at all in the pages do you see much about the macro economy and reasons for 20,000 job losses a week.

          I see one of the Keele economics courses is described on one of the course-choosing web sites with a note: "not required - critical thinking", and a suggestion that it should be studied with something similar, just to reduce the chance of critical thinking even further. This is a bit like running a medical course with "not required - desire to improve health" on the prospectus.

          In the 1980s, students could see out of the coach window that factories were closing very quickly and that study of chi-squared in year two was not the answer, nor even the subject they believed they had signed-up to study. This problem of mis-sold economics courses remains at other institutions. Even if a student - maybe an overseas student - seldom left the campus or watched TV and didn't question the course, that same student would have noticed computers. In my final year, the teacher said "this is the first time someone's handed-in an essay done on a word processor". That student would have noticed the average and variance functions on the free spreadsheet that came with it.

          I suppose a few people find maths relaxing or illuminating. For everyone else, it is something like learning to drive that is only stimulating if you want to drive and for that reason.

          Lots of people think that algebra on the blackboard is necessary in order to understand common shapes that data forms itself into, and to try and learn something from the measured tables of data at the office of national statistics.

          Statistics has its own teaching conventions like Victorian science. Victorian science seems to have been invented to halt the industrial revolution of self-taught scientists and put them in their place. Teaching is like an episode of Tom & Gerry: some fictional object called "Tom" or "Gerry" or some other Greek letter gets decimated or squared or gutted and chased around the white-board with an impressive array of shorthand, in order to prove a tautology: top-left of the board equals bottom-right. With luck, students learn something along the way. I suppose Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" that I had to study was more or less a tautology too; the gist of it is in the heading, but readers volunteer to see a nightingale in a particular way or to think about the writing technique if they're on a course. Oh I've gone off the point, and this is the vital point that separates what I'm saying from kind of Beavis and Butthead description of algebra teaching. It comes of learning Nuffield Physics at school, where we learned from experiment and grasping of basic principals rather than from algebra.

          What simple thing the algebraic shorthand describes is not clear, and it if a complex thing, then it would be better taught with an example. The teacher is usually someone who has done a lot of this as a maths student, but attempts to remove the most complicated algebra when teaching to non-mathematicians. However much shorthand algebra can be taken-away, alternatives are not added-in. The reason for a shape is not added-in.

          If the subject is rather political and attracts good points of view on both sides, like the subject of cheap public loans crowding-out the private sector, then the teaching does not give contexts. Something might make perfect sense in one place and have obvious faults in another.

          If the subject is entirely technical - like the squaring or data before averaging and taking a square root, or the reason that wave energy reduces from the point of splash, then there are still problems.
          • The teaching convention does not emphasise why one classic curve or distribution is different to another, which is the most easy and important thing to grasp and remember.
          • The teaching not say why one ratio happens and not another. It just says: "this is the algebra".
          If the subject is some messy mixture of technical shapes and wild guesses as to their reasons, then we get no further. Pareto distribions, I read on an open courseware web page from MIT, are rather like the back end of a tall dinosoar while it is standing-up: quite a steep slide-down from horizontal, down the tail to near-vertical.

          People who have done Nuffield science subjects or arts subjects are just bemused and apalled. When this harmless hobby is repeated a lot, they get to distrust it as much as traditional science subjects. The thrill is meant to be in the chase I suppose, which is called formal proof. Apparently you can even prove "equilibrium", but that's for the maths junkies. Simon Jenkins in The Guardian makes a similar point. Looking at Statistics for Economists on economics network, I see that other people draw some distinction between applied stats and theoretical stats. I suppose, if I understood stats better and was teaching this, I would twiddle these categories, trying to help students discover or realise the reasons for doing something a certain way in order that they remember it. Explanations that help a student remember are as useful as "applied" stats; explanations that show-off algebra but distract from the principal of the thing are worse than useless. It's hard to distinguish between pure and applied stats but some perfect teacher somwhere can do it. (I suspect that some ticky-tacky stats techniques developed to suit previous generations of calculator, or are there to show-off, or as an excuse practice mundane book-keeping jobs that no longer exist so much.) About the same time that students learn a technique or soon after, I would get students to use it on cheap software or slide rules and real figures to discover something real. It's slightly tricky to comment in ignorance. I know from studying Nuffield Physics A level that a lot of the work of traditional science teaching is just bad teaching in the wrong order with too many irrelevant bits. (Traditional physics A-levels of the 1980s gave points for knowing that the x & y axis are called the abscissa & ordinate, which they are not; it taught that things happened because of laws discovered by geniuses, which they don't). I know that I'm ignorant about why data forms into different splodge-shapes and have no idea what the diagrams on this page represent, so this paragraph is a bit of special knowledge and a bit of ignorance next to each other. When I studied, stats exercises did not use real and interesting figures. Those were reserved for experts who published journal articles which might be quoted in the textbook if they were sufficiently untrue. In the same book, X-shaped graphs are printed as models for something like the labour market that isn't X-shaped at all. The textbook looks so obviously wrong that it's hard to know whether anything about the course is right. It's taught in a deliberately unreal way, to emphasise that the subject is a "model", and not another model nor what really happens. Aggregate supply and demand in an area like the UK is called "The AD AS model", but that makes the concepts slower to learn and leaves less time to admit their limits. Take marginal costs for micro-economics courses. The subject is obvious in basic form and simply wrong when developed to complex forms without an example. Here is an example. You want to buy groceries. If you want to buy a lot of groceries, a difference in price can support the fixed cost of a longer trip, or maybe a supermarket can offer free delivery. You know this already, don't you? Most people have known this stuff forever, but economists like only discovered in the late nineteenth century and called it "the marginal revolution". Maybe a nineteenth century economist asked his wife.
          stimulate students intellectually through the study of economics and to lead them to appreciate its application to a range of problems and its relevance in a variety of contexts - Quality Assurance Agency benchmark

          I remember the chief using work-book examples with multiple-choice solutions for teaching basic micro economic theory from Laidler's book. It would have been neater and easier to relate the teaching to a recommended book, but the course didn't work like that. The examples were a personal collection of exercises and answers, collected over a career - specially at the start of the career when he taught 17 year-olds who did not want to leave Idaho. An example was from the Food and Drug Administration about how much feed to give to chickens. If you try to think how you can most offend and patronise people who signed-up for a degree course during an economic crisis, you might guess what a these events were like. Then Fishman had a joke which I quite like: he'd stop talking mid-sentence and say "it's five a clock so we'll pick this up again next week". That's why I remember the chicken example. He was half way through that one when he did his five-o-clock joke. The workbook examples were not like The Catch, which I guess is used by open university and interesting in themselves. The accounts of real companies could be a more interesting knowledge-check for a slightly longer face-to-face course. Maybe speakers from local firms would come-in for £200 expenses and explain how the theory applied to their particular case, if at all, or invite business studies students to paw-over the numbers and ask questions before giving a lecture in how fact and theory seem to fit. Since writing that I see that someone has tried something similar, using the few people in the world who's job title is "economist" but who are not teachers. That is a bit like trying to find a geographer out of captivity, but she had a go. Microeconomics is also taught at A-level, so I don't know why we had to do the basics again or whether there is any useful micro-economics. By year three I had studied economics for five years, but was still confronted with a man ignorant of the economy outside and too goofy to run a tutorial, rehearsing multiple-choice questions about the X-shaped diagram. It gets harder to learn and easier to forget each time the basics are taught, because they become more and more boring. I remember the work-book examples were so boring that it was hard to get them right and concentrate on them, rather than be distracted by the situation. It's like trying to concentrate while someone is throwing custard at you. Another intellectual stimulation was the layout of the class rooms. As in a school class room, the teachers desk would often be different to the others. One had a phone extension on it. What for? I wondered if it was for the evacuation call: "American economic policies have failed. The last helicopter leaves the embassy in 48 hours".

          Fishman took a phone call from his boss during a class 

          He didn't finish the phone call quickly or explain to students why he had took it. He began modestly with a nervous smile: "Now I have to take this call". I only remember it happening once, but there was nothing urgent; no emergency. The internal call would have come to a landline extension that flashed on the desk, put-through by the department secretary.

          statistician posing
          Why would someone leave instructions that they can take a call while teaching?

          Presumably the person who called was a few links up the funding chain or some kind of management chain, and had limited slots of time to phone, and Fishman was known to be working flat-out.
            It's a bit worrying that the phone call included nothing about subject-mixing, nor the rest of experience of how Keele worked. The English lecture course included a bit about a philosopher, which I forget but it was something like John Stewart Mill, or what sort of people like him were writing books at the time, and what sort of books he wrote. Whatever an Eng. Lit teacher could find to say about a book. They are good at finding things to say about a book; it's what they do in years one and two.

            I don't remember many other shared lectures like that. I don't remember an English lecture about Paul Samuelson's book, what kind of rules seem to apply to what he could put in it, why a rival book had just been boycotted when his came-out, or any of the others like Keynes. One of the wierd things about it is the history and habits of teaching alongside, in which a teacher can say "we used to believe..." of invisible colleagues, and these invisible colleagues are the ones that take common ideas and write them up in Econometrica or some journal like that, and so me them true "In economics". For example I read somewhere that "Autism has a different meaning in Economics". Daft, but the idea that a teacher can say "we" or "in economics" was probably common and Fishman did the first. So the college claimed to be good at subject-mixing, but it could have been a lot better.

            In 1996 the college opted to remain independent, rather than merge with the nearest college for the same age-group and hope to reduce mangement costs. The decision-makers would have justified this to themselves and anyone who asked by saying that the campus experience and subject-mixing system were unique. They would talk like the blurb from a book about Keele that somebody wrote, which lists some rather nice and wonderful ideas.
            ...struggle to establish the Keele Experiment, based on his "Keele idea". He traces the succession of principals, the establishment of Keele as a university in 1962, the unrest of the late-1960s and the very difficult years of the government cuts in the 1980s. Keele suffered worst than most...
            - blurb from Keele, Portrate of a University
            This phone call did not mention subject-mixing. Nothing about English Literature lectures to list what can be said about economics textbooks as books, nor American Studies lectures about where they came from, or History lectures about whether economists ever really talked sense about the potato famine or workhouses or the Bretton Woods agreement or anything else. Nor whether this man who had been on student demonstrations at UCLA and been summoned to something like the McArthy committee could contribute to the American Studies course, which he could have, but didn't. So I suppose that no mangement phone calls covered subject-mixing, because Fishman seemed so well qualified to do the odd lecture about American Studies, and he didn't.

            The likely people to phone would be the vice chancellor, and the visiting chancellor, a former government statistician who, I think, should have checked on how stats were taught in the economics department rather than phoning-up mid-class. This was the same person who thought it OK to divert public money from the welfare state to the Royal Opera House. He was part of a system that selected Fishman's replacement a bit later - when the first web site pages were archived - hiring a mathmatician from a posh college, not much connected to the UK economy, who liked playing games with algebra. His special subject was game theory. He wrote a book about it. I am being unkind with words. A game theorist would say that it means negotiation, and that Fishman taught negotiation skills in his time too, as do law departments, but the book on google books is still a book called "game theory" with a lot of algebra on the free preview.

            The reason you would appoint such a person to run an economics course is to make sure that it doesn't work and lets-down everyone who applies to study it. I can't think of any other reason. What else do I know about Keele vice chancellors and chancellors in the 80s? I know that they did deals with another college to try to reduce redundancy costs by swapping staff around, I know that they probably allowed some of the budget to faith groupeys and the empty purple building in the middle of campus, I know that they decorated the students union building without permission the year I left. It used to look like an LP cover by The Clash. They made it look like a proper motorway service station, or maybe a McDonalds, suitable for the sort of students they imagined they were paid to manage.

            What did Fishman's syllabus teach?

            My training in the best role for the public sector is the essay on the "public good", like a road or a lighthouse. Students were referred to Samuelson's article - probably "The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure", published in 1955 and now available free on Jstor. The article begins with a lie:
            "(1) Assumptions. Except for Sax, Wixell, Lindall, Musgrove and Bowen, economists have rather neglected the theory of optimal public expenditure, spending most of their energy on the theory of taxation...."
            What "The Pure Theory of Government Expenditure" doesn't tell you much about is government expenditure. What it does tell you about is a kind of closed-shop in which only the published views of some right-wing americans in certain journals count as economics. The system to excludes better-known ideas. The article ignores the authors of the Poor Law Amendment Act, for example, who favoured workhouses, or whoever worked-out the theory for Bismark's 1860s national insurance system or Lloyd George's one that started in 1911, followed by William Beveridge with his "Social Insurance and Allied Services" report in the 1940s. These are compulsory systems over a wide area - national systems - and often run by the public sector. The site notes a few facts about each of them like start date or pension age. The UK entry is a bit misleading because so much is funded from general taxation, but there is a note for each country. In the USA they had a social security tax introduced in the 1940s - it even gets a mention in the 1947 version of Samuelson's textbook but it's ruled-out of what "economists" officially know.
            "Therefore, I explicitly assume two categories of goods: ordinary private consumption goods ....which can be parcelled-out among different individuals, and collective consumption goods which all [individuals] enjoy in common in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtraction of any other individual's consumption" [chintzy algebra over a few pages omitted][ends].
            Googling the phrase "Sax, Wixell, Lindall, Musgrove and Bowen", I see that people still take this seriously and write learned articles as though they hadn't heard of social insurance. They try to write alternative justifications for the government spending a lot of money on things like their own salaries.

            algebra as a defence

            Samuelson's "Public Good" article soon dives into  are two or three pages of chintzy algebraic shorthand, which I doubt many people have ever read but serve to fend-off criticism from outside the inner circle of algebra experts and journal editors. I had a skim-read and saw some kind of academic's attempt at a joke about "Swedish bureaucrats" towards the end, so Samuelson must have assumed that only his colleagues would read that far and that he could put-in a barbed comment about the Swedish government introducing a welfare state.

            When a squid defends itself, it squirts ink. When a historian defends itself, it squirts footnotes to sources. When an economist is scared, it squirts algebra. That's all it the algebra means. Some of the nicer ones, like Fishman, did not squirt enough algebra to avoid cold war pressures towards unfair dismissal or summonses to senate hearings. He emigrated to the UK. Others economists like Samuelson survived the various red scares and CIA work to unseat any possible communist sympathiser in federal employment or universities up till 1971.

            herds as a defence

            Another odd thing about cold-war economists, other than the fake algebra, is the pretence at a scientific community who have a consensus view. Samuelson states his idea in one paragraph and uses the same paragraph to imply that he or the readers know who is a licenced official cold-war economist, usually including his friend Mr Arrow from the algebra club, but not including Mr Beveredge, Mr Lloyd George, Mr Bismark, or the Poor Law Amendment Act people like Mr Chadwick who were well-read in the ideas of Mr Adam Smith, Mr Malthus and Mr Ricardo.

            When grazing animals defend themselves, they form into a herd and run. Economists do this too. Right at the top of this blog post is a quote from my professor Les Fishman saying "we used to believe in keynsian solutions; now we believe in monetarist solutions". As someone who theorised about trades unions, he'd know the system. The more convincingly you say "we" the harder you are to single-out. The herd-like defence requires a pretense that the most quoted economists are worth quoting, which they're not, but it's part of the pretense that the subject is a hard science. The pretense also allows teachers to distance themselves from students, at one end of the room. Maybe face-to-face contact is between a graduate student helping undergraduates understand lectures and to revise them as a temping job to help fund the course. Maybe the professor doesn't have to do a single thing that could possibly cause trouble with the authorities.

            In Fishman's case, he said "we have to teach this stuff in order to call this an economics degree". In Samuelson's case, it was a bit easier. He simply wrote a textbook that funders and critics would accept, after they had boycotted a previous one by another author, who's book went out of print and who decided to teach in Canada rather than the cold-war USA.

            Merit goods as a compromise with what economists in the US say

            The Begg textbook is an odd thing promises to add a range of new theories to teaching, and it picks-up an oddball bunch along with the classic bad ideas.

            It embelishes the hard idea of a "Public Good" with a thing called a "Merit Good", like the Barnett Formula, Concord, Embassies, EU subscriptions, Iraq War, Latin, London Fashion Week, Nuclear Power, Opera, Olympics, Pagentry, RAF Fly-Pasts, State Visits, or Trident. Merit goods can exist separately or in combination. There is a touch of James Bond about a lot of them. The list emerges by tacit consent of the political establishment decade-by-decade, and are funded by blurring the distinction between an insurance-like role of government, in which there ought to be something like a National Insurance Fund to pay for it, and a Father Christmas role in which the budgets are given-out to the children at the end of the year by a chancellor Father Christmas. In this system, there is always money for Merit Goods; Father Christmas simply gives a bit less to the other children.

            It is hard to imagine that someone so stupid as to think opera a fit purpose for taxpayers' money could exist or be thought fit for any other. Royal Opera House themselves have found this problem with their trustees; they had trouble after this one was on the board. Nevertheless, he was seen as a safe person to be Chancellor of Keele University and allowed to ring members of staff while they were teaching. If I had written "Public Goods in Paul Samuelson's article are a way of avoiding the issues that college funders in the US do not want to talk about like Roosevelt's Social Security tax. Opera is also a Public Good because opera grandees are safe pairs of hands for other public employment", then my essay would be marked wrong.

            The call finished-off with a chat about money. The boss asked an opinion. Fishman thought that generations of staff had provided "a little bit extra" service year-after-year, starting at an un-defined date, then he repeated the point, "and a little bit extra", and that all these small services had added-up in cost. He proposed removing all those "little bits extra". He did not propose cutting central services; conversations between bosses and teachers do not go like that; the funding cheque went to the boss and money filtered-down to teachers. I suppose Fishman meant all the little expectations that taxpayers had paid for. Reasonable expectations of assessment & feedback; of academic support such as a tutorial system (I don't really know what "support" means but it's in the standard jargon), reasonable expectations of organisation & management like the two optional courses both happening, or equipment like access to computers in the library. If the course is partly taken for career reasons and there is mass unemployment, then some career advantage to graduates would be good. If a course content is based on true facts and plausible theories, I think that's reasonable to expect as well.

            This is another "little bit extra" - a problem-solving course that did not run in 1986.
            a second year course on what I called “Social Economics”, using a demographic foundation to develop arguments about the economics of healthcare, education, welfare, housing, poverty and social insurance.  The last thing second year students wanted to hear about then was the problem of pension provision with an unpredictably ageing population; here for the first time, in the actual uncertainties of demographic projections, I found something actually worth trying to model. - Tribe
            Once our speeded-up version of A-level economics was over, we tried a new part specially for undergraduates called an ISLM model, which is how to rigg a model sailing ship by moving-around various ropes in diagrams that have nothing to do with un-competitive factories, the exchange rate, how to change either. Nor dumping. I expect the "S" stands for sailing ship. Dr Johns taught this stuff and noted my attitude. If he had taught an open economy version of the model, which noticed exchange rates, I would have remembered, but I remember only frustration. I learned this stuff to remember for a few months during exam season before forgetting it again, and even that task was hard because the main course textbook, by 1984, had noticed faults in the model and said that the monetary policy side of it could no longer be taught in a textbook way. Talking of facts, some real data used for stats examples would be good. Some way that students can learn from each other or be a learning community in the jargon would be good, and a system of feedback from students so that college managers know the course is OK instead of ringing-up half way through a class to ask teachers' views. In those days the phrase was "merchantable quality"; nowadays it's "customers reasonable expectations". Generally, the list of reasonable expectations did not happen. Fishman argued for providing a substandard service for a standard price to make a bigger margin. A bit like an NHS dentist taking a phone call about how to do extra bad fillings to make more money off the standard payment. Students were not included in the conversation. We were like patients sitting in the dentist's chair. It would have happened in 1985, 1986, or 1987 and if anyone else remembers it I hope they leave a comment below. My dad once sold ad-space for The Times & The Observer, and kept-up a subscription for ever, even when Murdoch made The Times more Thatcherite in the 80s. I remember reading Times obituaries about people like the grandee who might have phoned - or Fishman - and reading about a different world. Some were awarded medals for the bravery of their troops carrying-out their stupid decisions. The obituary would go like this.
            "Captain 'Jock' as he was known, returned to civilian life at a time of high unemployment, Sir Jock was miraculously offered a job at X where he quickly rose to be Chief, a position he was to hold for 22 years during the decline failure and collapse of X in 1984 leaving fewer job prospects for the next generation. His hobbies were syphoning money out of X for his childrens' 10 year boarding school fees, and cricket. His is survived by a surprisingly patient wife."
            I suppose it was the same after the first world war as well. The UK has had a lot of Captain Jocks, many of them colonial governors, cabinet ministers and grandees.

            I wondered about Fishman's sense of hierarchy and tried to guess where it came from. He looked like what he was - a glove puppet for conventional wisdom. So where did conventional wisdom about how to teach economics come from?

            Starting when the subject starts

            "Les", as the obituary calls him, started teaching economics when I guess it was a trendy technical subject to incorporate the quaint little old subject of "business administration" that he qualified in, or "home economics" for the girls who chose not to learn shorthand and touch typing as my mum did. At the time Fishman studied economics, members of the trade were known. Their names were as clear as names of qualified doctors; some of their job movements and qualifications or deaths were stated in the peer-reviewed journals. In the same journals, algebra's explanations of equilibrium are accepted as like medical explanations of the human body.

            American academics are always right

            I think that US teachers grade students in competition with other students, and so a hierarchy builds-up with the teacher at the top and student capacity to spout conventional wisdom used as a way of ordering the ranks further-down. It's a very bad system. It suggests that someone in their late teens or early twenties, studying voluntarily, is not capable of having ideas or discussing things and should work as an academic and on an MA course before being allowed free thought. (For example Keele Economics Department in the twenty-teens decided to give-out some book tokens to the best-graded students for a photo-opportunity. A couple of students had other urgent engagements. I think you would, if someone offered you a book token for doing something intellectual in a way to score the most points. It's like taking a bribe.) Add to that a failure of US universities to provide many discussions with tutors, and you grand lecturers who are like hospital consultants without patients or politicians without constituents; there is nobody to bring them down to earth. The likes of Alan Walters and Milton Friedman give opinions to the world that wouldn't even convince their own students.
            The writer of a book such as this, treading along unfamiliar paths, is extremely dependent on criticism and conversation if he is to avoid an undue proportion of mistakes. It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics (along with the other moral sciences), where it is often impossible to bring one's ideas to a conclusive test either formal or experimental - J M Keynes, preface to the General Theory
            The same institutions with grand professors and no common sense can look confusing to outsiders, looking for a new idea like the Soharto dictatorship in Indonesia, the Pinochet regime in Chile and the Thatcher regime in London. They see speeches from US professors in vivid, memorable language. That's because the professor doesn't meet students face to face and gets no chance reason with other people in reasonable language; their job is to give a memorable lecture and guides are written for them to give contrasts and simple points and images. Milton Friedman had some point about tobacco farming was once being subsidised and how the streets came to be covered in unwanted tobacco plants - a great image but I forget completely what point he was making.

            Picture of a walrus to illustrate walrasian equilibriumWalrasian equilibrium

            There is another source of authority. The one called "conclusive test ... formal ", which just means that something agrees with itself; it is self referential. Students already know, because the teacher's tone of voice and expressions on other students faces shows that it's self-referential, but the thing is sometimes proved demonstrated with demonstrations of shorthand algebra. Economics students on the longer courses go through a sort of basic training in which they pretend to get a glimpse of "equilibrium" from mathematics. It concludes the course in economic rules-of-thumb by asking whether all the rules of thumb in the textbook explain enough of any economic problem to be worth using, and if so, whether anyone knows how much. American textbooks talk about Widgets as an example of products, but the British Edition prefers Snooks. Maybe other things to do with the economy in an area - like rent control and its effect on available shops or out of town shopping centres and their effect - are more important. The Begg textbook mentions rent control as something to do with bits of the UK property market in the 1980s, illustrating how different and specific econimic problems are. It also says that the economy is like a water bed, with changes in one bit effecting other bits. I am not cool enough to have ever been on a water bed, so for the rest of us there is the only book ever written and seldom-read about the subject in 1874 by Leon Walrus. Economic equilibrium is something to do with the curves of fond walruses, or the detail of a an-read book from the 1890s by Leon Walras who liked equilibrium. I prefer the first theory. I imagine the nineteenth century Mr Walras and Mrs Walras as two fondly coupled walruses. After nobody bought the book, Mr Walras began to think about practicalities. "Wifey", said Mr Walras, "What is it that puts food on our table?". "I will think about it and explain in a day or two", said Mrs Walras, before asking the other economist's wives in the walrus pack whether she should let-on. I expect some said "be careful: if you tell him how shopping works, he'll only make more algebra.", but Mrs and Mr Walrus were a fond couple and the next day she just told him. This is a quote about Samuelson, who wrote the classic textbook "a treatise in mathematical economic theory, patterned after classical thermodynamics, which set the tone for much of what the cleverest mainstream economists would do for decades to come. The protocol became: build a mathematical model of abstract actors engaged in constrained maximisation or minimisation of an objective function; prove that the model has a stable equilibrium; show how the model’s equilibrium conditions change when its parameters are changed". That's even more of a waste of time than I guessed as an economics student. One real effect of chasing equilibrium is that economists feel the need to build-up to it from micro-economics as a compulsory long foundation to the course like army basic training. It isn't an optional part of the course, nor a practical course with a context; it is a course in fairly simple graphs and rules of thumb, but rather too many of them for many people to want to study in go.

            Ignorance of the UK economy

            Maybe Fishman's sense of hierarchy came ignorance of how macro-economics describes, in part, an insurance-like service provided by European states. It must have matched an ignorance at Keele in 1970 about how ignorant US economists are.

            "The idea of the "welfare state" means different things in different countries. [...]Some commentators use [state welfare] to mean nothing more than "welfare provided by the state". This is the main use in the USA.

            Fishman once professed that "welfare" was less important than "defence" in a monologue out of nowhere, using the term in that american sense that would make him an administrator of a generous government scheme paid-for out of the current account. His ignorance of UK economics was backed-up by his compulsory essay to be headed "what is a public good?", which quotes Paul Samuelson's way of avoiding talking about a welfare state because the man knew that his textbooks would not be published if he mentioned national insurance or any insurance-like services provided by the state over a time. Paul Samuelson knew that textbook buyers had rejected his rival's book because it scared them. He knew that texbook buyers and their bosses considered state spending to take place within a financial year, with no concept like a national insurance fund. These textbook buyers consider "welfare" to be a transfer payment by all taxpayers and specially the very rich, towards other taxpayers and specially the very poor who pay next to no income tax. These textbook buyers do not like the idea of middling-income people using the state as a cheap insurance company; these texbook buyers are a bit wierd that way.

            Input Funding

            The system of university funding at the time was rather like a donation of aid from ministries back to taxpayers. Most of the money was paid by grants to institutions to keep them going, on condition that they looked busy doing the right thing (a "merit good" according to the textbook). I used to picture it as an amount of money poured-in through the chimneys at the top of the old college building, in hope that enough of it would filter down to the students and staff at the bottom. The textbook describes overseas aid in much the same way, talking about leaky buckets rather than chimneys, but I expect they work the same way. The layout of buildings at Keele, between a motorway and a bus stop, does suggest that they were dropped from a Chinook on an aid mission rather than designed to help people who lived nearby and wanted to study. Maybe the money came as a giro cheque after filling-in a claim form for "Vice Chancellors' Benefit" at a jobcentre. The vice chancellor has to fill-in a long form, like a tax or benefit form, with awkward questions about how many students and what spend and difficult stuff like that, which justifies high pay in officials but doesn't justify high pay in housing benefit claimants or taxpayers. I don't know the reason for that but apparantly the filling-in of a long form is high-paid work if you are a vice chancellor and not if you are a tax payer or benefits claimant. The person who cashes the benefit cheque (vice chancellor - not housing benefit of job seekers' allowance) awards themselves nearly ten average wages, then passes-on the rest to the director of final salaries who claims about five average wages, and so the money trickles-down. There's meant to be a trickle-down effect in the private sector too, which doesn't work either. (The more modern version is output funding, in which the biggest liar rises to the top of the organisation for making the most exaggerated claims of success to funders. They also use the most crooked techniques to unseat rivals, people who are at the top of the pay scale, people doing jobs that could be filled by friends and family, or just anyone, for the fun of it. Examples are Roper at London Metropolitan University who claimed grants for more students than could be found in practice, and Piercy at Swansea University who was caught fiddling the exam results to make-up for the effects of unfairly dismissing colleagues part-way through students' courses). My father saw an advert for pension sales staff at Allied Dunbar ex Hambro Life. There was a new pension trade in the 80s made possible by the new right to sign-out of the state earnings-related pension scheme. For sales staff, the deal was to pay for brief training in hard-sell techniques. There was a fee for the training which was usually loaned and sales people were usually the redundant middle-aged of the time. Sales staff were asked to work-through their own address books for sales leads, and given minimum sales targets alongside bills for the training. They were told to present themselves as independent financial advisors, but only to sell this one type of pension. I expect the training warned against mis-selling of pensions. My father paid for the training in cash and I think he made the odd sale by sending out loads of letters to mailing lists under the name "Donald Robertson Pension Services", but he gave the thing up. The rest of the story of 1980s new employers is in Robert Peston economics books; if my dad had stayed in the business, he would now be selling legal help in getting compensation for mis-sold pensions.

            Input funding can be a good system for delivering something that doesn't change much, because it saves huge cost of running a market and making individual payments (I think insurance brokers earn up to half the first years' premium), so this still could have been a good system with a few checks and balances. The system works best when there is a consensus all-round that a reasonable wage for running the thing and putting-up with all the hassle is about double the average wage, and a reasonable discount for doing a job that loads of good people apply-for is about half the average wage, and the John Lewis Partnership keep extremes between different layers in the hierachy to seven times lowest wage paid for the highest wage. That seems a fair system and a beurocracy run efficiently by such a system can out-do a private sector market. Even if the top jobs attract loads of cliche-driven dragons from The Apprentice or internally-minded people from internal promotion, and the only way to get a half-decent cliche-driven-dragon is to pay more. I think that describing the job well on the advert and making it sane are other ways to attract talant, so it should be possible to run a university with sane bosses and remain in credit at the bank. If the vice chancellor job advert said "sane person to cope with hassle and do nothing where nothing needs to be done", it might get more applicants than an ad saying "Insane person wanted for world domination, starting with Keele University and its Internationalisation Agenda". That is an example of a bad job ad. I know from my Begg "Economics, British Edition" textbook that supply of economics courses had been close to demand in the 70s; the book quotes a very low minimum A-level grade to get a place in its digression about degree courses. A-levels were a lot harder to pass before Google, but the minimum is for two A-levels, not three, which still seems low. In 1983-4, it was harder to get a place. The same texbook mentions that people do degrees in recessions while they wait for the economy to recover and provide a job. Meanwhile, governent cuts funding. Keele's government funding barely filled the buildings in the 1980s: management insisted that students spend a first year on campus. I heard somewhere that numbers had been halved to the low thousands - maybe 2 or 3,000 students at Keele, so there was no danger of empty spaces. London Metropolitan University has been known to fiddle the figures and write on the grant form that there are more students at their university than really exist. I have no reason to think that this happened at Keele except the strangely distant teaching style in the economics department, which I think has other causes, so I doubt this fiddle happened at Keele as it did at London Metropolitan.


            Talking of checks and balances, there was no problem flagged-up by bad student feedback, because there was no system of student feedback in the economics department. No vice chancellor insisted that there was a system of student feedback, nor external examinor, nor whatever system allowed Keele to call itself a University and get grants. If a problem was known to the funders and grandees, it wasn't thought a problem by Keele's grandee figurehead who visited in between visits to the opera and gave Fishman a ring. Nor the people from other economics departments who signed reports that Keele economics was OK, even though the department's main course had no tutorials and no stats software. I suppose their courses in other universities were just as bad.

            Fake schools of thought; the double-act

            This fiddles the issue of whether a course includes critical thinking. It presents two points of few and tells you to compare and contrast. It does not allow a student to put a third point of view; it's just a technique. The technique becomes more oppressive when students are steered-away from original sources like Keynes or Marshal. The equivalent in English would be to say that there are Levisite Freudian and Feminist ways to criticise a novel, and no student may criticise any other way. Keele English Department had no such nonsense, and of course worked from original sources, but did mention something in Gulliver's travels that's like economics:

            Wikipedia on Gulliver's Travels The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown". The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end. The Big-Endians gained favour in Blefuscu.
            Apparently the two economists Samuelson and Friedman used both to have columns in the same journal, putting a Keynsian and a Monetarist emphasis on whatever needed to be done that month and I suppose they suggested contrasting jobs for the weekend like planting opposite vegetables or such, but in a punch and judy kind of way with monetarists as the villain. I expect they did lecture tours together. I don't know if they shared motel rooms on those tours. If they did, I expect they had twin beds rather than double beds, because motels in 1950s america could have been strict about that kind of thing. The problem is when these people are expected to step-out of their Punch-and-Judie role and take a balanced decision - specially Mr Punch. This could explain how the Thatcher government got it so wrong by consulting american academics, and thinking that if the Keynsians had been tried they might as well ask some monetarists what to do. In defence of those who consulted Mr Punch about economics, there weren't many rival theories about in the USA; only Big-Endians and Little-Endians were allowed. Keele English department had something a bit like that as well. Jonothan Swift wrote "A modest proposal", which is very much like the thoughts of an economist used to play the baddie in fake academic controversies, suddenly asked to address a real problem. Economic solutions are more to do with raising of tax, running of social insurance schemes, and access to workshop space, training, and equipment, I think. If the teaching of economics starts with a problem to solve, there is less chance of getting a comedian in comic role to try to solve it.

            Assessment and feedback

            Assessment arrangements & marking have been fair
            Feedback on my work has been prompt
              I have received detailed comments on my work
            Students should be assisted and supported in their endeavours to analyse and explore information and to draw appropriate policy conclusions. - Quality Assurance Agency.
            A staff team forced to spend maximum time in front of students and zero time in tutorials would not have a chance to give feedback; their diaries were full. I remember none.
            Opportunities for one-to-one interaction with members of staff, during which students can receive individual help or personalised feedback on their progress, may not always present themselves as ...
            formal, scheduled sessions.
            'Office hours' for example, are a frequent feature, where members of staff are available for one-to-one sessions during set times.
            Interaction via email is another example of one-to-one contact time. It is important that students are able to recognise these as opportunities for interaction with institutional staff.
            When students receive feedback on assessed work, whether one-to-one or in a group setting, this can also be considered to be an important element of contact time which contributes to students' learning but which, again, may not be formally scheduled. - Quality Assurance Agency: Contact Hours
            I know that I made points about how stupid the worst economic theory was, in the margin of the textbook. I would remember any chance to put these points to teachers, and their replies. I don't remember; there was no chance. The middling economic theory was OK but narrow and dry out of context. Often explained from the basic X-shaped diagrams with little triangles on diagrams called things like "economic rent" that students skim-read in hope of return should the subject ever prove important.
            to develop in students an ability to interpret real world economic events and critically assess a range of types of evidence. - Quality Assurance Agency
            Professor Fishman did not base his lectures on numbers, so there was no way of challenging his statements with figures, just as we were not allowed to talk. He professed a consensus of colleagues, and constructed a comprehension course of textbook concepts with emphasis on McArthy-era journal articles to show we were an adult class. The tradition is referred to at the start of the Begg textbook, first edition, where Begg says he will try to put real numbers down the sides of graphs rather than using them as diagrams, and he will quote recent theory where relevant - as he does with fiscal and monetary policy - rather than stick to what's usually taught. Fishman stuck to what was usually taught, from 1950s american journal articles. Concepts such as "a public good" - a theory I remember reading live from some journal article like this one - or two theories about how to calculate "net present value" versus "internal rate of return" from one or two economist's sums, setting essay questions to show understanding of these journal articles, rather than the broader issues of the size of the public sector or long-term investment. As I write in section ten, below, any original ideas in essays were simply marked wrong.
            ... every student is enabled to develop as an independent learner, study their chosen subject(s) in depth and enhance their capacity for analytical, critical and creative thinking. - Quality Assurance Agency Expectation .... awareness / familiarity with the possibility that many economic problems may admit of more than one approach - Quality Assurance Agency benchmark for economic degrees
            Cramming students for an exam has a problem. You can only cram for the lower pass marks; you can't cram for the independent thought that self employed people or employees like the Civil Service graduate appplicants system need.
            Higher education providers operate equitable, valid and reliable processes of assessment, including for the recognition of prior learning, which enable every student to demonstrate the extent to which they have achieved the intended learning outcomes for the credit or qualification being sought. - Quality Assurance Agency Expectation
            The largest single employer of economics graduates is the Central Statistical Office, through the civil service graduate entry scheme and exam. The point of a graduate entry scheme is to attract people who are different to the internally-promoted, or at least have a good degree. A job like Fishman's first temporary job, at the Aluminium and Magnesium section of a war planning department in Washington, would not have been available to most graduates from Fishman's own course.

            Fishman's second job was a trade union researcher. By 1988, before open source software was common, social science research jobs required very expensive software experience. The one I wanted to apply for requried "knowledge SPSS softare or similar". I tried to get a pirate copy off an ex-colleague I hardly knew, but didn't have any luck.

            Once Fishman professed out of nowhere: "we used to believe on Keynesian solutions but now we believe on Monetarist solutions". There were no other economics teachers in the room: his invisible friends made up a Royal "we", and shouted an extra meaning which was "don't answer back"; "only ideas from economics journals are allowed - nothing about personal thought and ideas; nothing that helps you get a job either", which is silly. I only discovered later that Fishman's invisible colleagues were probably at McGraw Hill's sales team who sold teaching aids to teachers, like workbooks of multiple choice tests and lecture notes to teach from. I only discovered later that Fishman had thought all-about bluff and rank, which was a subject of one of his favourite authors:
            Even to-day there are such things in the usage of the learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation, and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees, dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a scholarly apostolic succession. - Thorsten Veblen
            I knew at the time that Fishman was lying about "now we believe": three hundred and sixty five real economists had written to The Times condemning government economic policy.

            Academic support

            I have...
            received sufficient advice & support with my studies.
            been able to contact staff when I needed to.
            Good advice was available when I needed to make study choices

            The first problem was trust.
            I did not know what to do with an 800-page book that had crosses on it; I didn't know what sort of thing it was or who it was for and am only just-now reading its 34 chaptors, which are surprisingly good.

            University students are usually given original sources to discuss in tutorials, I suppose, except in Economics where we studied what the teachers said, with journal articals with a textbook as backup. The book was treated like Samuelson's 1948 textbook, which is a kind of general introduction to everything economic, but Begg's  1984s textbook is different. It's written by three people - one in the UK and two in the US. It's written for different age groups - some in the UK aged 16 and, some doing degrees from age 18 or more. It was written for at least two different countries with adapted material, so there are more groups than the UK A-level and UK degree readers. The largest US market has no national social insurance system, so things like unemployment pay are not much mentioned in the text book, just in case buyers in the USA think it's a book for commies and don't order it, as has happened to other textbooks. Social insurance is the most important thing that UK government does, and reduces a governments' freedom to cut spending because unemployment just puts-up the bill for benefits. It has various advantages over private insurance for simple services that everybody wants and are not means-tested. Even the more complex NHS manages to be a lot cheaper than the US system. I don't remember studying any of this. Lastly, the book was sometimes about an economy with a lot of imports and exports like the UK, but other chapters are about a closed economy, more like the USA where there are a smaller proportion of imports and exports. This is against a background of news reports known to be untrue about how well or badly the economy was working and how the economic policies were meant to work. So students started the course with a distrust of economic opinions, and learned to trust them less along the way I suppose. With hindsight, I should just have read a chaptor a day of the thing until I knew it backwards.
            The normal bit
            The more money the college made from you, the smarter the place to meet. I don't know if staff ratios were the same in each department but have an impression that Eng. Lit is cheap, with one estimate of depatmental costs at Bristol Uni putting it at £3,000 a year per student on an £8,000 a year fee. I forget the reference.

            About economics.

            "student staff ratios - from the 1960s to the 1990s the standard ratio in university economics departments was 15:1 the range of courses has been cut, and "small classes" commonly contain 25 or more or more students, rather than 7 or 8"


            "The transition in schools to to "teaching to the test" carried through to universities, students becoming mainly concerned with their grades, and increasingly disengaged from their subject of study." - Tribe 2014

            Take a cheap arts subject.
            At one end of the campus was a formal garden designed to stop you thinking about the coal miners a mile underneath. English Literature students met in the old building by the garden, in some tutor's office. The building was made out of ivy and pomp. We would talk in tutorials of say six, once a week. There would be a reading list, notices on a notice board, and good lectures in a hall somewhere. That was it. Tutorials and a noticeboard, with some lectures and reading lists.

            We took a subject that other colleges elaborated, and we made it simple. People like me who hadn't done the subject before were chuffed to get a taste of it: it was like a holiday that we could not believe was happening. Somehow, this cut-down subject led to a bit at the end that felt as though we'd done a proper degree and were specialising, even though we'd done all sorts of subjects rather than just English. That's how the system worked when it worked well.

            The internal bits of a major course would last about a year with one teacher and one tutorial group, so we'd get to know each other by the end. To complete the list under this "support" heading, students could also walk-in and knock on the secretary's door to hand-in an essay, we could phone for some reason like having to miss an appointment. There were central services like the big library and the Speed Queen launderette.

            Science students got a place in a kennel by the dustbins.

            Social science departments were in the middle: a crescent of rooms with plate glass windows and fitted carpets.

            There were a lot of social science departments at Keele. I visited a few on short courses but staff were more penned-in. I doubt that the professor of Economics shared a loo with International Relations or Politics. To do so would reveal to the economist that these departments ran maximum-size tutorials of about 12 people while discussing original texts or videos or lectures. Economics teachers pretend ignorance of such things. Some of them state that they don't want students of Economics A-level, who are aware of how social science is usually taught. To glimpse it in practice through glass panels in doors, or to hear about it in snatches of conversation, would have caused unease. The notice boards in other departments might even have said "tutorial". I suppose that when an economics professor goes to another department, students have to hush their conversations and black curtains have to be draped over any evidence of how social sciences are usually taught. Dropping-in to use the loo would be out of the question. It would be like a visit from Queen Victoria in mourning.

            The most worn carpet in the department corridors were by the notice boards. The Department of Economics at Keele University had a puzzling notice board, giving clues about what we had to do next, what "quantitive methods" were, whether the expectations would get clearer, whether this course was going anywhere, and what would happen in year three where there were just question marks or something like that.

            Something about economics suggests that it is an introduction to future secrets in a way that other subjects do not. Schools of thought are based on data that an undergraduate is unable to crunch. Texbooks use words like "economist" as though such a job is common. Professors can use phrase like "... in economics", as though truth were different in different subjects. Autism has a different meaning in economics for example.

            Other worn patches on the carpet led to rooms where groups of students would meet a tutor to discuss the week's books from the reading list and lectures, and hand-in essays and recieve marked ones back. Social science tutorials were large, maybe 12, held round groups of tables

            There were no tutorials: that was the difference; the Economics department had classrooms. In other departments, the tutorial was the important compulsory thing.

            The department that looked like other social science departments next-door was run.
            In the early 80s there had been problem-solving "workshops" of students in groups of 6. By the time I arrived, most of the course was run more like the University of Boulder, Colorado in the 1960s where the chief had done a previous job before starting Keele Economics Department. The rooms had desk-size tables in them, set-out in rows with bigger table at one end next to an overhead projector or a white board. It wasn't like boarding school. We did not have to arrive with a trunk containing a tweed jacket three ties and 12 sets of white underwear; that might have been a rule for the staff. We didn't have to pack a bible and prayer book, but we did have to buy an 800 page book with crosses on it. There was no brass lecturn in the shape of an eagle - that would be odd - but we discovered that meetings were called a "class" which was quite odd for a university, and there was a telephone on the teachers' desk which was a quite odd. There is probably a statistical term for two things being quite odd.

            "Classes" would be small lectures or drills in subjects like statistics for two hours a week, which were alien to the departments like politics or american studies or english literature. I guess they were unique to Economics. Maybe Computer Science had them. I read that US colleges don't have tutorials, so the man who managed this economics department got a management and professorial job with barely any relevant experience. His CV says he was a teaching assistant for a couple of years at Berkley, which I gather can mean filling-in for lack of a proper tutorial by running small groups for "recitation" - a drilling excercise. Teaching assitants can help with revision, or possibly discussion. On a scale of badness, one to ten, with ten as the baddest teaching I could have expected at a UK university, a recitation is about ten.

            There were no teaching assistants at Keele, so economics students joined a different kind of club to 1960s american ones. When you get older than school leaving age - specially at student age - you should be able to study pretty-much on your own and extract knowledge from an expert who isn't a great teacher, but this man didn't give students a chance. He didn't talk about subjects he was interested in, like unemployment or trades unions. He stood at one end of a room and tried to cram us full of Paul Samuelson's view of the world; a textbook view of curves and introductory algebra.
            Lecture: A presentation or talk on a particular topic; Seminar: A discussion or classroom session focusing on a particular topic or project; Tutorial: A meeting involving one-to-one or small group supervision, feedback or detailed discussion on a particular topic or project; Project supervision: A meeting with a supervisor to discuss a particular piece of work; Demonstration: A session involving the demonstration of a practical technique or skill; Practical classes and workshops: A session involving the development and practical application of a particular skill or technique; Supervised time in studio/workshop: Time in which students work independently but under supervision, in a specialist facility such as a studio or workshop; Fieldwork: Practical work conducted at an external site; External visit: A visit to a location outside of the usual learning spaces, to experience a particular environment, event, or exhibition relevant to the course of study; Work-based learning: Learning that takes place in the workplace. Affair: undefined. QAA: Contact Hours
            We didn't use first names, or any names, even towards the end of a course: not "Les", nor "Leslie" or "Fishface" or anything else. We didn't use any names except to read from bits of paper like timetables and office doors. There was no interaction that would require the use of a name. There was no interaction that would help professor Fishman know the expectations and abilities of students except different variations of scowl on young faces. We were good essay-writers for example - postwar education in the UK had a lot of essays at O & A-level. All of us had noticed the recession as well, and wanted to test the ideas we had written and read-about. We were used to independent thought, conflicting opinions, and original sources. A lot of us were interested in manufacturing; that was big in the 80s too. In Colorado or UCLA, where Fishman learned his trade, the separation of students and staff is still normal; very short courses called modules are taught from a distance to a bus-load of people:
            This is a large class. I probably will not learn all of your names. In addition to the course lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you have been assigned to a once-a-week small review session with one or two teaching assistants. The teaching assistants for the course are there to help you both in the review sessions and in office hours. - Professor Edward Moray who has 500 students at Colorado
            On discovering that UK universities emphasise tutorials, Fishman must have decided and said: "no: not for me", and the people around him must have gone-along with it for two years at Warwick University and then forever when he got a boss job at Keele. I expect he got caught-out as clueless at Warwick Uni and didn't want to be caught-out again. He was in favour of tutorials, in theory, just so long as they never happened. A colleague mentioned the first part of the sentence while checking whether we students were OK with the concept on our final year. We were. He even dared go with us to a pub at the end of the course (although not at the beginning) and we didn't throw things at him. According to his book he'd done the same in 1984: "I am greatful also to my students at Keele for heated discussions on some of the ideas presented here.". But Fishman was not going to change his position because of facts. As he said to a visitor in Colorado in 1965, there was always some reason that the students needed to be "spoon fed" for failure to "absorb a text book", which sounds a bit like feeding a Sufferagette on hunger strike. Another writer about 1960s US college teaching agrees. Fishman believed the same at the end of his career as he did at the beginning. We students and teachers didn't learn from each other. I have no idea what the other students thought about anything, which is a pity because life after college doesn't provide such good opportunities for people who disagree to find-out about each other.

            Other social science departments had large tutorials of about 12 students, so I doubt people learned a huge amount from each other, but there was no chance in the Economics department. I think that's the hardest thing to re-create after college; there is no similar chance to meet people while they are learning about the economy.

            For example the textbook quotes steelworkers as an example of unemployed people who have bid their wages up to an un-competative level. Someone on the course had a dad who was a steelworker before the local steelworks closed. I would like to have a memory of a teacher asking "does anyone have parents who have been through something like this?". No. That wasn't considered a suitable source of information, whether true or false. I wondered where all this economic certainty came-from, if not from real life.
            These approaches to the learning process are supported by appropriate resources including access to economic data bases, such as the Office of National Statistics data base, information technology based resources, and written materials. The use of such resources encourages active learning and the ability to select and make appropriate use of supporting evidence - Quality Assurance Agency default
            The department had a lot of doors which probably led to vacant offices, because government cuts had reduced the college size to the minimum to use the buildings - probably three thousand students. Jobs called "professional support staff" didn't exist.
            Another room in the corridor was the lavatory, because even American economics professors poo. If you opened the wrong door, you might find a sort of waiting room that doubled as a departmental library.

            Journals from the Office of National Statistics was stored in the departmental library, immaculate, with spines un-creased, in a safe place where nobody would ever find them because we didn't use primary sources for data. A lecturer mentioned them when we had to do a computer stats excercise. Maybe Eurostat data was there too - I saw it mentioned in handouts but never discovered how to look it up. As for the "red book" mentioned in a lecture about the budget statement, I tried asking in Chiswick Reference Library but the librarian said that it wasn't published under that title.

            We didn't use primary sources for ideas either. Not a page of Keynes or Friedman or the chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe's speeches was  turned. The Prime Minister decided to say she had an official economic advisor from an academic background. His comments were not un-picked. Shelves on the classroom walls had long empty spaces. Students were encouraged to subscribe to the free journals sent-out by Lloyds Bank in those days before the internet, but we never had much use of their content. The Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin was sometimes quoted.

            I said that the big difference was that there were no tutorials on the main course. None. Nor any invite to anything like. No tutor, no drop-in times, no discussions, no computer time. In the things called "class" someone would stand at one end of the room like a weatherman, talking about something forgettable like chi-squared and test exercises to stop us forgetting it until the exam, and then revision classes. Some of them were about economic theories that were obviously untrue or inapplicable. I don't remember how often people asked questions in class; it wasn't encouraged, but that was the only interaction between staff and students. There was no option to opt-out of the obviously stupid parts of the course that taught wrong facts or un-usable skills. There was no need for advice about study choices because there was ony study choice in each main joint-honours part of the degree - a choice of between two short specialised courses in the third year which were taught like courses at other departments, with tutorials, and that was it, for three or four years of life commitment. The third year wasn't as long as years one and two because of exams and the need to hide in a room and revise every waking hour in the months beforehand, so the specialised course was short. After a month or so hiding with revision notes, and some exams, people drifted home.

            Keele ran a Foundation Year. A lot of next year's students were walking-around the same corridors. They could be contacted with no need for a stamp and asked a question like "do you know that this course repeats A-level?" or "what would you like to study instead then?". That didn't happen. As at other universities, economics students are attracted by a sort of con, which is to use the same subject name as a popular essay-based A-level and then dissapoint. As at other universities, students' ability to choose a course does not run as far as reading and understanding the prospectus. I didn't even know what the non A-level subjects were. I just assumed that you do A-level, and then you find out a good place to "do" the same subject at uni or if you are very naughty at Keele then maybe change in a foundation year. I didn't realise that there is a great un-solved problem of whether Uni courses repeat A-level, or whether Uni courses with similar names teach unexpected things. So I was at fault for not knowing what to study, and good advice as not available to people applying to Uni in order to find out what they wanted to study and compare it with what staff wanted to teach. Teachers and students had to put-up with some kind of handed-down tradition of what a Uni economics course is meant to be.

            Organisation & management


            There was a problem with year three. Half of it didn't happen and we had a thing called a revision course instead. I
            Any changes in the course or teaching have been communicated effectively. There was a problem with year two: no tutorials. This was a change but students didn't know it. The early 80s course sounds good, with "problem-solving workshops" of students in groups of six, but by the time I was there in 86, there was a man at one end of a room teaching about 25 people about ISLM curves in a closed economy - one where imports and exports aren't important like maybe the USA in 1930 . 15. The course is well organised & is running smoothly.

            It was calm

            16. The syllabus is roughly described on the prospectus and brings together people with a common interest.
            There is no student survey question for how well a course is described to prospective students.

            Describe too much, and you prevent yourself as a teacher from adapting to the the people who turn-up. Some want a clear hard-to-fail course for no very good reason. Maybe they think it will help them in business which seems inplausible. Some want a broad discussion in which it is easier to loose track of what's expected to pass the exam. Some expect a course to follow A-level, which seems reasonable. Some don't.

            Describe too little in the prospectus, and you can attract oddballs to an otherwise under-subscribed course who do not share any idea of why they sat-down in the same room together on day one. The system was to write about an A5 or A6 - size page of Times Roman in a printed prospectus, sent to reference libraries and school careers advisers. I'd like to see a scan of the one for 1987 entry Keele Economics. If any student wants to ask for a copy in the library, scan it and email to shop at veganline com that would be appreciated. It probably said that there was a broad lecture course and a narrow series of classes that dived-in to the essential detail needed to understand economics for general interest or financial careers. The students, like me, probably came for all sorts of reasons and that's a fault; students should be marked by teachers for the national student survey if it's fair. An online comment from an economics teacher from some college is that the variance between students in what they want is so great that you can't please many of them. An online comment from an economics student from some college is that nothing on the course can be used for anything - begging the question of why they applied for the course. Personally, I would rather have studied industrial design but had no idea how to do it - my careers teacher thought it was something to do with art colleges. Given flunked A-level grades, I discovered Keele Foundation Year and went from there.

            15. The course is well organised & is running smoothly.

            Fishman summoned students for no reason during the course, forgot what he had summoned them for, but did not apologise. I was one of them. I expect he had got the name wrong. I wondered again about his sense of hierarchy - it looked as though he thought he power of arrest as an adult education teacher, maybe picked-up when people who left US colleges faced the draft. The memo read...
            "please see me immediately"
            ...without explanation. It was typed on a plain landscape ticket of paper about the width of A4 - something you might print with a tractor-feed and a daisy wheel printer. You can see a sample here from the author of "The Price of Fish". A4 paper went a bit crooked in the american letter-width machine. So the department secretary most likely had a word-processor. This is relevant to the learning resources paragraph. As for the message, that's all I know. I don't remember if it followed my too-and-fro under the other heading: feedback from students. Fishman must have known the faces of students, if not names because he only had a coach load of us in each year. I was on the register as David Robertson. I said my name was John. Maybe he remembered by question about Servis washing machines at the Design Centre. He paused.
            "Let me see. How are you getting on?".
            This was the second time he spoke to me in my time at Keele. I don't know if I had a lucky escape. I liked to escape mad bureaucrats by using a different first name in real life to the name on the student register - about the only social skill I learnt at boarding school. If the plan of "all members of the department" had been to throw me off the course for answering-back or "attitude", then this trick saved my place on the course, combined with a thrifty approach by the chief. If I didn't say anything terrible, he didn't need to know any more. Maybe the note was meant for someone else.

            I suppose I was getting-on OK; I had understood where to go at what time, I later did lots of revision and got my degree, but remember being puzzled by a lack of pattern in the course. This is a current quote about "module options in economics" that assumes a single-subject degree course:
            "Universities offer a wide range of modules presenting us with a difficult task. We have chosen 20 modules that we feel are representative of all Universities nation-wide. Names and content of modules will differ depending upon the institution. Not all institutions offer all 20 modules listed but many offer others that we haven't covered." - economics network guide for prospective students
            Keele University offered loads of course options at random but only two courses for choice to economics students, reduced to one plus revision at whim in my 1984-7 group.

            I could study the UK economy or Cow Theory, which is untrue, so I studied the UK economy for about a quarter of the time over about 20 weeks in year three. The only other choice was whether we understood the notice board or not, and I had trouble. It began with vague headings for years one and two like "quantitative methods". Methods of what? Or time devoted to "micro economics" and "macro economics", as a kind of introduction to something that never happened. Economics is like that. There was a good textbook, nearly 800 pages long, with about 30 chaptors highlighting vital points in red and listing revision summeries at the end of each chaptor. I'm only just reading it now: it's goodish. But, when a teacher taught textbook economics, it was not related closely to the textbook; we didn't have a list of what chaptors covered the same topics as whatever lectures. They were in a more academic style in which the X-shaped diagram of supply and demand is called the "SD model" in which S and D do something-or-other for those able to pay attention. The third year timetable was mysterious because the chief himself didn't know if there would be one or two optional modules, or else revision. I expect it had picture of question marks and dragons and sea monsters on it. What were we meant to do with our statistical knowledge or "quantitative methods" before we forgot it again? How many subjects were we meant to study in enough depth to answer an exam question? I suppose that if there had been tutorials, someone else would have asked these questions, the tutor would have said something, everyone else in the group would have discovered, and the tutor would have known better what should be typed and put on the notice board.
            "the joint honours degree meant that each department was constrained to deliver just the core of the subject, since they only had about 6 hours per week of the students total time. The purpose of the design was to enable students to put together unusual combinations of subjects through their own choices, which was a good idea, but with a teaching downside. And then in the 1990s students increasingly opted for related subjects, making the original design redundant.

            The second year economics in the 1980s was

            • three hours lectures, two hours on stats, and
            • one class.
            The third year was similar, with
            • one or
            • two
            options in the final half of the year."

            - email reply to a question from an ex-Keele economics professor

            " knowledge in an appropriate number of specialised areas in economics as well as an appreciation of the research literature in these areas." - QAA benchmark
            If there was a coach-load of students per year for economics, half-time in the second two years (less in the first) , then a class was probably for 15 people and a lecture for 30, costing five hours on the payroll per week. Add to that the cost of preparation, marking, and administration, and you get more, and I could be wrong; maybe there were two coach loads of people on the course but it was certainly a cheap course from college administrators' point of view and not great value from my point of view, with teachers stuck between the two points of view. When Keele economics staff were threatened with redundancy in 2008, it is a fault in the system that they could not have just gone and taught in a room above a reference library somewhere in the pottery towns and got just as many applicants without the price of a hierachy to pay-for.

            There were no study choices in economics except between the British Economic Crisis course and one on Cow Theory. Degrees were split as joint-honours, there was a choice of short courses, and people on the foundation year did even more of them as well as having a good chance of changing degree choice, so this isn't as bad as it first sounds, but there was no warning given to Foundation Year students of what was to come.

            Anyone who had done A level economics, and then been taught it again with pointless algebra on Fishman's syllabus would be keen to avoid the main economics course and do something related instead. I remember no warning given to foundation students.

            Anyone who had done A level economics and then the main economics course would be keen to get-on with the final year options, specially in the middle of an economic crisis.

            For no stated reason, Fishman declared that there would be only one specialist course for my year group, and that he would tutor a "revision class" in the time remaining, to teach the more technical bits of Economics A-level for the third time. "Tutor" was just a word on a notice board. He handed out photocopied sheets of excercises and we rehearsed answers or watched him run-through an explanation. Excercises about things like diminishing marginal returns.

            Learning resources

            I have been able to access general IT resources when I needed
            I have been able to access specialised equipment, facilities, or rooms when I needed to.

            There was another management problem in a slot-together course. Who is best placed to teach computerised stats or allow "access to specialised equipment" to social scientists? The Computer Science Department run by temps? The Library? If they both refuse, who's next best?

            The same problem applies to any course that uses technical equipment, and the answer should probably be the careers office, that might try to arrange access that non-students can use as well as students; access wouldn't end on graduation day. For example if Staffordshire Uni could teach parts of its pot course in commercial factories at weekends, and the same factories let time by the hour to anyone safe, that would be good for small pot businesses in Staffordshire and good for under-employed pot graduates.

            The problem ran from the early 20th century, when tabulating machines were useful but expensive, through to 1987 when people at Keele still used the mainframe, until a few years ago when job adverts still specified epensive software like SPSS that no job applicant would want to buy in order to train for the job.

            1940s and 1950s computing

            Practical Farmers of Idaho continue a tradition of statistics used for practical farming, particularly at the Idaho State College where the two types of mechanical calculator - an adding machine and a tabulator - were teamed together with the help of people who's job title was "computer" and plenty of help from business administration or economics students looking for work. US machines were unusual in using punched cards; the ones in my dad's business had adding machine printouts and card displays on racks, with ingenious puching-through of numbers through carbon paper to different account sheets and cards, but no database. People who's names are quoted in statistics books travelled long distances to see the set-up at Idaho, and other colleges like Colorado copied the set-up later. By 1958, Colorado's statistical laboratory had an IBM 1620 computer. There are pictures of it on page 15 of the link. Fishman used it, or a successor, to print tables of correlations for his team's work on unemployment experiences of ex defense workers. There were similar computing systems developed in the UK, twice held back by one person. Churchill chose the gold standard in the 1930s, making exports difficult, and the same Churchill ordered the break-up of the Bletchley Park computer after the second world war. Dispite Churchill's efforts, there were computers in UK colleges in the 1960s.

            1960s and 1970s computing

            Fishman lectured for a year or two at Warwick University. Their library catalogue has a folder of old press releases which they have labelled "Folders": "Folders: Oct 1966 - Sep 1967 - New buildings ... Statistics Lab". They would have used a GEC or ICL mainframe. Later the college made a video to explain their stats program called SPSS. That was a free program developed in 1969 at Chicago University and described in a McGraw Hill manual that appeared college book shops and most college libraries from about 1970. It ran on the kind of mainframe computers that ran Fortran and were owned by universities and large companies. If Keele had a computer it was quite likely the one in this 1973 sales brochure , which was daunting but had a keyboard and a screen and a text-based disc operating system as well as free training from the manufacturer, if your boss paid a vast fee for the computer. Keele has a few books in the library about programming with Algol in the 60s and 70s - a system that was also used at Stamford Uni and had something to do with cards. Fishman was well placed to start teaching SPSS; he could watch the videos at Warwick University. He could read the manual in a library. He could get the program for free in the late 60s. He could even afford a car. His daughter was on an economics course at Sussex University and could tell him what they did there. Fishman had experience of using some kind of punched card system for his surveys of labour trends on Denver in the mid 60s. None of these advantages persuaded Fishman to take the initiative, risk doing something he was bad at, and learn how to use the thing. This time he didn't go-in to the job as the boss of the project, so it would he harder for him to cover-up mistakes. Not all social science departments at universities used statistics software for undergraduate courses. A reference from St Andrews University says that some social science departments only had a handful of people registered to use their computer in 1971 (see "ten years ago", bottom left of the linked leaflet). SPSS was free for a while, then very expensive, so rivals including open source or cheap stats programs took most of the market. By the end of the 1970s, office and university computers were more common. Free and cheap stats programs were available if obscure and hard to use. Keele had an OS4000 operating system on a GEC mainframe for a main central computer service by 1980 which could, presumably, run programs like SPSS although there aren't many references to Keele and computing from the 1970s, nor named software that could run on the OS4000. There are references to Fortran, which was also used by punched card systems in the 60s for surveys of employment trends in Denver.

            1980s computing

            Expectation C Higher education providers produce information for their intended audiences about the learning opportunities they offer that is fit for purpose, accessible and trustworthy. - Quality Assurance Agency It's impossible to believe that anyone in the 80s would have signed-up to an economics degree that had two hours' a week of manual stats computing, if they access to information that was fit for purpose.
            Note to self: combine green bits

            St Andrews University had SPSS on their mainframe but expected to give it up as users moved to the MSDos version as released in 1984, with an asking prices from $795 to $1,400 for all three parts. Their document mentions consultation - something alien to Keele economics students. I remember a GEC mainframe computer available to computer science students in the mid 80s - used for attempts to teach Pascal without much success. There weren't enough decent books on how to use Pascal because, as the teacher said "It's hard for me because people don't usually use Pascal; I don't use Pascal", but it was the programming language that the GEC computer could handle by default. This was one of the loads of short courses that everyone had to do. There were terminals in a room in Keele's computer science department, available all day and all evening for anyone to register to use. The terminals were a bit like MsDOS with no teaching help available and probably fewer functions.Keele Economics Department would have a word processor - most likely an early Amstrad that had a PC/M operating system or a PC with Wordstar. Both came bundled with a program called Supercalc. Supercalc Version 1 had no statistical functions beyond a lesson in the manual for calculating "break-even" on fixed and variable costs, but the 1987 versions of Supercalc and its cheap rival As Easy As (version 3, 1987) had buttons for
            • average (mean),
            • variance
            • standard deviation.
            Meanwhile the job agencies of London high streets had postcards in the window for people who could touch-type, and people who could use Lotus 123, Wordstar or Wordperfect.

            The department secretary could have been the best qualified teacher available, because she had the latest manual. The 1987 degree exam was obsolete even as we took it in terms of preparing students with craft skills for getting jobs in job agencies.

            Going off the point, I don't remember any non-teaching support staff at the department beyond someone who answered a phone call once. Now there are this many, which I count as twelve. The economics department in 1984-7 had fewer students than the combined department in 2016, but not twelve times fewer, and I somehow had the impression that there was only one person to answer the phone and do the admin when I was a student.

            1980s half-sane or sane computing

            If you were running an economics course in the 1980s, you could try to use the secretary's copy of Supercalc or whatever was affordable to run on any available shared college computers. The choice was more confusing because of a short-lived public education program. Grants were available for schools to buy Acorn's BBC Micro computers, and even colleges got a grant in May 85. Software for them was aimed cringingly at the school market, but that might have included something good for stats, while college departments would have brochures from Instat through their letter box, available from November 1985 at under £100 from Reading University, who's current price is £500 for a department and free for non-commercial use. Five Ways Software produced a stats program for the BBC called "Status" in 1987, the same year in which Trius Softwrae included functions for Variance, Mean, and Standard Deviation in As Easy As Version 3 the same year. ( dot zip)

            Academic journals reviewed other similar options for other operating systems, and you can check the names of the programs on google scholar and jstor. Whatever the best system, information was easy to get. Economic policies, that we were not taught about, lead to the closure of the Acorn Computers and BBC Micro production soon after. So, running a small Economics department in the 1980s you would have had a few choices, with the added complication of an operating system that had come-in and gone-out of fashion very quickly. Otherwise the choices were familiar enough.
            • How to share computers stats teaching work with other departments?
            • How to get usable software & computers in a place with evening access and security?
            • Can existing hardware - BBC Micros, the computer in the office and the Computer Science mainframe - run good enough software?
            The half-sane option would be to read the brochures that came in the mail and the journal articles, buy something like Instat, put it on at least one BBC Micro, and bolt that down to a desk in the department library, increasing numbers as demand required. The sane option would be to work something out with the main library or computer science department, who had buildings open in the evenings with security. It would rely on other departments being sane, but other universities managed it and Fishman was a negotiator. He could have had a word with the college Grandee, Sir Clous Moser, who was a statistician. Except that he did; I probably heard it in class. It was the call about "that little bit extra" that needed to be cut-back in order to pay for Moser's opera. [Technical note: politicians seldom compre one budget like education against another like arts, and economists don't pick them up on this point often enough. Maybe this is because grandees from the Royal Opera House are then appointed to run every other instituion in the UK].

            1980s computing: the crazy emergency kamikaze option

            If you wanted to run a 1980s economics department as badly as possible in hope of an early retirement deal (or some such reason) you could work-out the absolute minimum to be done to avoid getting the sack too early. It was a difficult thing to pull-off, because all economics departments taught badly - even the ones where Leviacic and Redman the textbook authors worked. Other departments like English and Politics and American Studies and Industrial Relations were all taught very well, but Economics departments are something special. So: how to teach badly enough? You could lock some cheap computers in an empty room with a glass panel in the door and say "those are the computers" to external examiners as they walked past. You could also get a computer program specially-written if you wanted to, or, more plausible, get something free from a shareware library and either way you could say grandly "the software was specially written for this department" to fend-off any questions. I got some software that way for my dad's PC, but found it hard to use or apply to anything real.

            We students were allowed to use BBC Micros like the ones in the photo for one exercise only. We chose two columns of figures - advised to go back 25 years I think - and checked correlation, using a simple command-line program that was hard to use or apply to anything real. There was no feedback or discussion of any student results - even our own - we were simply scored on our ability to do a stats exercises with numbers we had chosen.
   develop in students, through the study of economics, a range of generic skills that will be of value in employment and self-employment - Quality Assurance Agency attempt at a consensu statement on Economics
            Keele graduates had a skill too completely useless to put on our CVs. Fishman's CV starts "1942 (Fall) Assistant statistician, Aluminium and Magnesium Branch, Production Board, Washington DC". If a similar job cropped-up in 1988, Keele Economics graduates would not qualify to apply. Fishman applied during a shortage of qualified people. If a similar job cropped-up in 1988, an employer would have trouble fending-off all the applications. By the mid 1980s, a $60 MSDOS spreadsheet had stats processing functions, affordable for self-employment. Job agency windows in West London still had some office jobs and named the software needed, which was never related to BBC Micros. Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 123 were the programs for getting jobs. Instat might have helped get a job - it was at least a named piece of software that could be quoted on a CV. SPSS would become a favourite for social science research job adverts because it was so over-priced that it was nearly impossible to learn at home. I know this because I tried to get a social science research job ten years after graduating, and failed to find a pirate copy to learn from. Fishman's department got £23,900 and then £9,810 of taxpayer funding from the Economic and Social Research Council starting in 1985 for researching redundant Michelin Tyre workers in the Potteries, so there should have been a chance to pay for some software out of that money as well as funding out of teaching money. The oldest SPSS software book in the college library is 1988; if Fishman had done his job four years earlier, four years'-worth of students would have had massively better job prospects.

            20-teens computing

            awareness & proficiency in quantitative methods & computing techniques appropriate to their programme of study, show an appreciation of the contexts in which these techniques and methods are relevant & how to use them effectively across a range of problems. - Quality Assurance Agency benchmark for economics degrees
            There were fewer things like Quality Assurance Agency Benchmark Standards in the 80s, but the principal still applies; I expected to use current computer technology for some kind of model and any reasonable applicant to the course would expect the same.

            A digression about the chief, Les Fishman

            The man's name was "Leslie Fishman". It said so on his office door, as do descriptions of the Fishman Bursary, in memory of all those who suffered his awful course. His bottom, pictured above, was known as "Professor Leslie Fishman". Professor Fishman left a lot of records and I wonder if they show why a teaching economist could so clearly talk out of his bottom about the UK 1980s economic crisis at the height of its effects, to some of the people most effected. He was an interesting, decent man in other ways, which makes him easier to write about. He also taught a course that was meant to be "introductory", or a taster course I suppose. Textbooks have "introduction" written on them. So I have always wondered what this was an introduction to; what secret events go-on behind the scenes, and obituaries of Leslie Fishman suggested that there might be something to find, which there wasn't but it's a biography worth a look. All I discovered was that I am still angry about the 1980s recession and economists in general. And I found some Pete Seger music online which is a kind of curiosity.

            Tha man's name was "Leslie Fishman". It says so under this picture of him before judges in a public competition to make noises out of his bottom. Or maybe it is as the report says: he trying to drum-up student support for a staff boycott of a system called a "loyalty oath" at UCLA, University College Los Angeles, where he had become part of the furniture since the age of 16. The front of him made a speech, reported as dramatic. The subject attracted however many students you can count in the photo, But it was his bottom that became my professor in the early 80s. Fishman in the 70s and early 80s survived a peer-review system that suggests he was not much worse than economics professors running other short courses like the Oxford PPE course, that schooled several MPs and people who MPs meet. University College London and probably Open University ran short economics degree courses too. (A couple of teachers from Open University and Middlesex University - Leviacic and Redman - wrote a textbook about monetary policy so stupid that I wrote angry notes in the margin dispite the chance of selling it for a fiver if I had left it clean.) Fishman Junior - Nina Fishman - donated just about every bit of paper from her life to libraries. Les Fishman had an interest in US civil rights that left him remembered in fond notes scattered across the internet. There is so much that I should transfer most of this to another page and cut what's written here. Lastly he belonged to a party that might have got him on the list of people to stalk and bug at MI5 and got him in the picture above and if so the file might one day be released to the National Archive just as one of his ex colleagues in the USA has seen notes of reports to him to the FBI by a college president. The scale of injustice against political people was large. I am not sure quite how to look-up records. I think there were overt efforts from about 1946-56 and covert till 71. That late date says something. It is late enough to wear-out a man who was once a debating champion and student activist, and force him to move to the UK where teaching standards are higher and it rains more. It is late enough to suggest other US efforts to promote any available gangster (or better) to run any available country in order to stop the spread of something they didn't like and called communism. Most of this section has moved to the post headed Leslie Fishman

            University of Berkley Arts Bachelor, war service, and teaching

            The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress July 9, 1918, takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star to Sergeant Leslie Fishman, United States Army, for gallantry in action as a member of Company G, 303d Infantry Regiment, 97th Infantry Division, in action at Troisdorf, Germany, on 11 April 1945. ...
            General Orders: Headquarters, 97th Infantry Division, General Orders No. 12 (May 2, 1945) -- In the assault on the Glockner Works at Troisdorf , one platoon was immediately cut off as it entered a building in the factory complex. A firefight developed in which several soldiers of the platoon were killed or wounded. The platoon's position was untenable. For Sergeant Leslie Fishman, the solution to the problem was obvious: the Germans should surrender. Sergeant Fishman and Second Lieutenant W. Christianson, a company officer who was cut off with the platoon, persuaded Nazi soldiers to lead them to the officer in charge. While admitting that they were hopelessly surrounded, Fishman and Christianson warned the enemy officer that an American battalion would soon be in position to attack the Glockner Works and that the wisest course of action would be for the Germans to surrender immediately. Within a short period of time, six German officers and 170 enlisted men were prisoners of Lieutenant Christianson and Sergeant Fishman. The courage, initiative, and determination illustrated by this example were attributes of many of the men in the Division. -

            The CV is from Fishman's thesis, eventually submitted in 1957. He didn't mention the medal. A document from April 1950 has "Leslie Fishman, lecturer in business administration and spokesman for the Non-Senate Academic Employees", the same one who addressed students in the top picture and is sacked in September 1950, so he only got one year of lecturing experience, and no money to look after a child. It looks as though most of the benefit of the job as accomodation and a chance to get a second degree, needed for a teaching career, and he hadn't finished the one he was doing.

            Fishman would also have been an obvious target and obvious speaker because a web reference cites him as a "former CIO researcher" - the CIO being a union group hounding-out communists at the same time, so he lost both jobs. The CV doesn't say anything about the jobs. There is a record of a Senate enquiry into the textile trade, where the CIO boss answers questions and Fishman sits next to him without speaking. There are clues about the teaching assistant and lecturer jobs from Fishman's teaching style later-on. He was keen in "revision classes" and cancelled other study options in order to teach them himself. He would also come-up with folksy references to every-day finance. These are the clues about the subject and teaching skills he would have picked-up.

            • US colleges don't do tutorial discussions as a rule. They may have revision classes run by teaching assistants, or the odd discussion, or "recitation" which is drilling of workbook excercises. Searching online for microeconomics workbook exercises, you see references to UCLA and courses like this one in 2013. It's hard to see why someone would sign-up to such a course, even if paid-for indirectly via taxes to the state of California. 45% of the marks for this wrote-learning course are awarded for agreeing with the teacher in homework and "class participation", and there is a maxium proportion of graduates who can get top grades which would allow them entry to graduate-entry schemese or a chance to pay for further study, perhaps funded by being a teaching assistant. Anyone who graduates well from this course is a good actor or easily-led. It is the opposite of a good english degree.

            • Business Administration Degrees at Berkley are now only available to people who drop-out of a major subject after year one and study for two thirds of the rest of their time, starting from scratch; the same system might have applied in the 1940s, and it if did, applicants would be people who wanted to avoid the draft but didn't dare mention anything so controversial in an essay or a tutorialm because the likes of the McArthey committee would summon them and question them and generally upset their career prospects and funding for the college if nothing else. Business administration degrees do not cover macro-economics and more like those modern degrees with titles like "hospitality and tourism" that produce the most unemployed graduates.

            • Hass Business School Extension Program is another brand name of the same department. It runs an adult education evening class; it is not part of a degree course. They scour the globe for people willing to pay them money for courses like

              I haven't worked-out how much it overlaps with university teaching at Keele 1985-7.
            The poster girl for Hass Extensions is someone sent by her employer - someone internally promoted, not proven in business or business-minded, who wants to test her common sense knowledge and play a part in company meetings. The markets for that kind of teaching at the time could have been training for returning soldiers, guest events at schools, general knowledge courses for young apprentices; anything that any institution wanted to pay for, with cheap staff and an immaculate proposal. I guess these adult education business administration students are different from college students in a recession who have already done A-level economics A level . One group is interested in micro-economics; one macro-economics. One group generally wants to know how well things are working, the other group wants to know why they don't work. One group is there because they want to prove that they know how a whelk stall works; the other group are there because they think they already know how a whelk stall works and want to know about the Treasury. The modest group has a job; the grander group has no job. "Do people keep money in their checking account now? I remember, when I was younger, you would always try to keep a little bit of a reserve in your bank account". Fishman had a slow, goofy way of talking, and I remember some of the lines that seemed a bit odd later-on when he taught university degree students. He had an odd style of self-interruption would suit technical subjects. He'd say things like "it costs 99p. Do you want the 1p change? No? Well maybe you do! A piece of research says that people do prefer to pay 99p".

            My father was also a student in the first years of the war. It was easy to get a place in a grand-sounding university in the late 30s and early 40s because people at universities are usually of military age; if you were fit for one university, I guess you were pretty-much fit for all of them. The teachers were like the cast of Dad's Army, and a lot of students were called-up during their studies, as was my dad. His brother didn't return from fighting in Holland that involved the stalking of an enemy sniper post from behind a haystack, with a very long radio arial. Officers on both sides had ordered continued fighting, even though anyone who listened to the radio righly guessed it was a few days from the end of the war in Europe. Fishman had tried a few experiments at Berkley, trying to help students who got badly treated while working as restaurant staff by taking collective action. He didn't get far but it was a good idea. He had another idea to delay or stop this planned loyalty oath system, which was to get enough people to refuse on principal that it could not be used as a way of sacking staff. Another good try. My father also served in the lowest rank and survived doing Russian supply convoys in wobbly Liberty Boats by fluke - because they were cancelled. He was offered a chance to be a weather man and took it. The meterological staff used to use seaweed to look technically competant to visiting officers. Like algebra, nobody knew what it meant except that the met office staff were busy. When allowed to leave the forces he returned to his university, changed his subject and met his partner a few years later. He said that returning soldiers are good at exposing silly managers. Someone at his live-in college tried to stop students returning after-hours by putting barbed wire on the walls. Ex-commandos took it off and very honestly left it blocking the manager's staircase, just in case he had some other use for it. The page below is the kind of teaching material available for Business Administration lectures. It's from the contents pages of Samuelson's 1948 textbook. You can see it on the "search inside" page on Amazon for a new reprint and there's a transcript on a blog page called Leslie Fishman Writings. There are other chapters but these are the most relevant for reasons I guess below the quote. A first impression is that there wasn't an A-level economics course in those days; this textbook starts from scratch, which gives it a sense of being a coherent whole. It's based on one decade, one author, one country. Those who read every word might have more detailed comments. The person who wrote it had an easy job because a reason for being a student in 1948 - specially if you ended up on the business administration course - was to avoid the draft to be killed in Vietnam, a subject absent from the textbook. Paul Samuelson's courses were full to the brim. Likewise, when I studied at Keele in 1984, the main reason was to avoid unemployment of the kind surely to apply to us students of useless teaching by over-paid people who listened to Pete Seeger and reheased multiple-choice excercises about broiler chickens and X-shaped diagrams. Whatever teaching assistants did at Berkley, it might have included revision classes and answering questions from puzzled students, so Fishman would have been a walking index to the new Samuelson text book. For his dissertation, he would have known chaptor nine almost by heart. A student newspaper suggests he might have lectured in insurance, so he would have known chapter 10 almost by heart, as well as any other chapters that he worked-on as a teaching assistant. The year Fishman got an unfair dismissal, a 35 year-old from Idaho did the rounds of California academic conferences touting the most un-apealing jobs in academia. The job was in a small college surrounded by cows in the middle of nowhere that was not yet called a university, although it planned to award degrees in three years' time. It was a college for older teenagers. Other courses were the things teenagers studied in Idaho - often very precise craft subjects like "fender repair". The job started in a few years' time with the title "instructor". Student reviews call this one of the "best cheap colleges"; wages probably weren't good. And so many teenagers were studying any possible degree course to avoid the Vietnam draft that it was hard to get academic staff at any institution, let alone Idaho.

            Idaho state college Pocatello 1955-8

            People in Idaho have an unusual characteristic. They are very serious about farming statistics, and like to share good ideas for free rather than keep them secret. At least, that was the opinion of the young editor of a farming magazine called Practical Farmer who managed to borrow the latest calculating machines and teach himself statistics in the 1920s and 1930s, helping to build-up the statistics laboratory at Idaho State College. He went on to become vice president of the USA so he might not have been typical, but Idaho was the place to be to study statistics and farming. A similar enthusiasm survives at which I now realise is in Iowa rather than Idaho. A reference survives in Fishman's free-to-read work on unemployment in the Denver area a decade or two later. He footnotes a guide book to statistical methods, written by someone at Idaho. There's no record of anything Fishman wrote in the Idaho college library, but a google book search reveals him as "Instructor in Business" on a couple of inspectors' reports. Type "Pocatello" into the search box for either report and you see very specific course titles like "Fender repair", so "instructor" was a good job title. Idaho is somewhere were people are used to awkward beliefs, at least in their own traditions; it is a religious area with a the main tradition set by the prophet Joe Smith, who explained his trips to kneel in the woods by saying that he was praying and sometimes visited by an angel (that's in case anyone asked why someone was seen leaving through the bushes). It is hard to know if Joe Smith was a moron or a mascot. He was prone to visual hullucinations and somehow became a preacher (something that mentally troubled people still do in the USA according to an episode of Lois Theroux). Joe Smith was taken as a mascot by people around him when he preached. After a while the person in the bushes gave a name - "The Angel Moroni". Most likely the angel was a printer who ate biscuits, because a present appeared in a buscuit tin burried under a tree, for Joe Smith to find. The box contained a book written on "plates", which I suppose were printing plates but described as "golden plates" by Joe. I expect that some are lost because there is no mention of cruising in the woods in the book of mormon, but there is some stuff about polygamy. The faith group does practical things as well as credulous ones. It's rural. Current student reviews mention things like bowling clubs and long walks rather than politics. They don't note many alumni on wikipedia - just one beat poet and members of sports teams used to fill the gap. Fishman got two years' work at Idaho before completing his second degree, still awarded by Berkley and listed on their library catalogue in January 1957. It's called "Theories of the American Labor Movement": 500 pages exactly, plus 11 pages of bibliography, with other subject categories of John Rogers Commons (1862-1945), Robert F Hoxie (1868-1916), and someone has scanned the microfilm to put online but been restricted from doing so beyond a keyword count from a search box; the Berkley catalogue calls it "restricted content". If any Fishman relatives want to contact Hathi Trust, who keep the scanned archive, and make a case that they are the copywrite holder and give permission to publish, that would be good. Fishman's 12 year-old daughter asked him if he was a member of the communist party: "I don't believe you have the right to ask me that question. I have a constitutional right to freedom of association", he replied. Nowadays the position would be called "Don't ask; don't tell". He had relatives in the Soviet Union and wouldn't want to draw soviet police attention to them, nor US authorities to himself. He had fellow-travellors like Pete Seeger, the singer he's quoted as liking, who were called to Senate committees and used the same stock phrase; he would not have wanted to let them down either, even if he had lost all interest in political groups and preferred the saner technocratic world of economics.

            The same year that Fishman got his doctorate, the local paper stated that he was leaving for Colorado and he was invited to speak on a similar subject at Cornell University, as part of a series of lectures commemorating Thorsten Veblen's free pdf and other works. There are 11 books on Veblen in the Idaho college libary, mostly from the 40s and 50s, but not the one that gave space to Fishman and edited by Douglas Dowd of Berkley and Cornell Universities, now at

            Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd (born December 7, 1919) is an American political economist, economic historian and political activist. From the late 1940s to the late 1990s, he taught at Cornell University, UC Berkeley and other universities. He has authored books that criticise capitalism in general, and US capitalism in particular. Now in his eighties and semi retired, he continues to publish and has, for many years, offered a free class in San Francisco, where he used to live for half of the year. Now he lives full-time in Bologna. His last professorial engagement was several years at the University of Modena. Finally, the commute from Bologna became oppressive; he terminated his teaching career in 2012. - web site
            Douglas Dowd gave free economics classes in San Francisco and still keeps-up the website including a $10.95 download offer on the book with Fishman's chapter. D. F. Dowd (ed.), Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal (Ithaca NY, 1958), subtitled lectures and essays commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Veblen's birth. Fishman's chapter was called Veblen, Hoxie, and American labor. That association seems to be what gave Fishman the sparkle-dust to look employable again. Someone sent an invite to Cornell lectures to the Cornell Daily Sun who didn't send a reporter but published the invite next to their adverts for smart underwear and horror films. Somehow, the invite records Fishman as already a professor at Colorado University who printed the publication in a proud book of staff writings soon after. The lucky break remained a family memory. A colleague of Fishman's daughter mentioned Veblen to her.

            "Oh, my dad [the late Professor Les Fishman, Marxist economist] was very interested in Veblen, he contributed to a volume of essays on Veblen back in the 1950s". "With the help of the indispensable Abebooks I located a lone copy of "Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal" (Cornell University 1958) and was astonished by the profundity of his ideas, briefly revisited by a few American Leftists in the 1950s and then dropped almost without trace."
            That essay seems to be the only thing that Fishman wrote before a gilded career as a highly-paid teacher who avoided tutorials; it was a done deal. Keele teachers know how hard it is to look employable when you can't publish anything, and you can't publish anything because your job is to teach the basics, so a published work made a difference. He wrote a little more over time, when he was new in a job or when someone asked him to co-write. There's a collection of Fishman writings on another page.

            University of Boulder, Colorado 1958-62

            Fishman got an economics job teaching at his home state college of Boulder, Colorado. I think I saw a Google snippet of him recorded as an assistant professor in 1957 but am not sure. A powerpoint promotion of the department puts him down as "faculty" for 1956-7. He was recorded as chairing a meeting there and working for the economics department in 1959 as part of a grand set of debates on all subjects. He signed himself "Leslie Fishman, University of Colorado" when writing for technical journals. So I guess he was there in the background, giving lectures, assigned to research projects, maybe supervising graduate students, allowed to take a temping job on Ford Scholarship money, but not obvious and up-close to undergraduate students. That's why the dates are vague. Samuelson's new textbook from 1948 was so confident in its own superiority that (I think - I might be wrong) it suggested a course plan in an appendix for lesser professors to follow in this expanding subject, as though there was a shortage of professors and the people who got the job were all glad of a text-book to bluff from. I knew that there was a Great War an Great Depression but I didn't know there was a Great Professor Shortage at just the time Fishman qualified:

            the demand for professors was so high in the 1950s that the American Council of Learned Societies held a conference in Cuba noting the too-few doctoral candidates to fill positions in English departments.
            The shortage would have been most acute in new subjects. Pocetello began teaching for degrees and for Economics about the year Fishman joined; Boulder gave its economics teachers a separate department and larger building for more student numbers about the time Fishman joined. Even so, it's good to get called "Professor" after teaching the jobs available to graduate students. Professors get a double cell and someone to use as their bitch in the gulag under the campus (someone told me that and then gave me a funny look). It is not easy to compare to academic job prospects now. Usually you have to do something like teaching well, writing well, having another relevant career so you can say how things are done, being part of the Freemasons or the casting couch. In Fishman's case it wasn't the casting couch so the next thing to check his writing on Google Scholar's links to Jstor journal library. He taught about economic history leading up to current US growth rates, or at least he had the notes to hand because he worked them up into nearly 5,900 words 1960. It was quite a polished set of lecture notes, published in a journal for long articles. The paper would not have scored good marks on Fishman's own course, later-on at Keele, because it mentions original ideas in the final section which would have been marked wrong, but this is a tolerant journal. Another paper is titled "Is Higher Education a Hoax?". Then Econometrica reported him at the American Economic Society conference held in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1961. Fishman's name just has an asterisk next to it. He was given the last slot on a Tuesday afternoon to present his paper, after some grander macro-economics and a someone who loved algebra. Someone else who write about elasticity of demand for synthetic rubber got an asterisk too. Maybe their paper was too practical and immediate. Most people might have liked them; Idaho students might have liked them. They might have got published an Ebay Seller Guide or a piece in Plastics and Rubber Weekly, but they didn't get journal ranking peer-reviewed journals. The rule is: either you discover sacred texts buried under a tree in a biscuit tin, or you get published in a peer-reviewed journal if you want a college teaching job. I hope that he and the synthetic rubber person consoled each other. It was no problem because Fishman could do grand prose about economic history, he could keep an audience's attention in a lecture hall, and he could work on technical government jobs. The problem that would come-up was tutorials. He could tell his daughter that "I have the right to freedom of association", but it could break the flow of discussion if students asked him the same thing every week. If it was possible to be a professor and not do tutorials, Fishman had a good reason to avoid them. The Ford Foundation temp. job at Cambridge came very soon after getting work at Boulder. This suggests that economics college teachers were in demand, that Fishman had a certain knack, and that tutorials were not a big deal at Boulder; you wouldn't plan to jet-set around the world and leave a UK tutorial group with a new teacher. Keele students know that most UK colleges have three terms a year and most US ones have two, so the dates wouldn't have fitted. That's a pity for Fishman and his students because he missed the satisfaction by knowing what happened to them during a year and he missed their common sense and mess-ups and obvious questions. I guess that tutorial students can bring an economics tutor down to earth. I guess that this post-war anglo-american subject of economics lacks common sense because so many people have taught it without running tutorials. Fishman's daughter says he was "headhunted" to Boulder and "won" a Ford Foundation grant to do something at Cambridge. Was it the Freemasons? In a way, yes. This is someone else's account of being offered a chance to teach at Boulder. He discovers the american emphasis on lectures.

            Les Fishman, visiting from the University of Colorado, received an SOS from back home: An economic historian was urgently needed for 1963–64, as the incumbent had gone off unexpectedly to Penn State. Now economist economic historians weren’t all that many in Cambridge, so the barrel was scraped and I was offered a visiting professorship at Boulder, where I had a very enjoyable two semesters, and learnt how to lecture. I must have been pretty awful to begin with. One of my auditors, whom I later met a few times on the ski slopes, asked after a few beers in the Nederland Tavern: ‘Are all English lecturers so boring?’ I’m sure he had a point; but I was learning, and when I went to teach summer school at Purdue my audience ratings were quite respectable.
            I expected to read another paragraph saying that this man was keen on US Civil Rights or Communism or against the Vietnam war, but the freemasonry seems to be more among a narrow group of teachers who gave each other jobs - the same man says he was put on some committee as a "counterweight to the ... marxist faction", which would mean people who used a one or two ideas from Marx to find something easy to say about their subject, rather than someone who supported Stalin. So, there was a freemasonary among people who could vaguely look as though they could do the job during The Great Professor Shortage of the 1960s and somehow Fishman had joined it. It would be nice to think that Fishman promoted the new job by offering free taster classes on free-thinking subjects, like Douglas Dowd. Or open-ended discussions, like the teach-ins at Berkley. There was a series of odd multi-subject lectures from visitors during United Nations Week each year, followed by questions from the audience or debate with other guest speakers. Records don't say anything about student discussions, nor tutorials. If there were any on the timetable, it would have been hard to fit them round Fishman's schedule as he jumped from Boulder to Cambridge, back to Boulder, then on to Warwick University for a year's teaching in 1967. That might have been the first place that anyone noticed whether he could hold a tutorial or not. Fishman headed the list of authors for research on government contract: "Methodology for projection of occupational trends in the Denver standard metropolitan statistical area". There is a free pdf of the 1965 edition and the 1966 revision. Fishman was remembered by some civil rights acquaintances who used his free hospitality on their way to a campaign. They quote his slow goofy diction.

            "we looked up Les Fishman (economics professor at the University of Colorado) .... They put us up for the night and then we toured the campus the next day." "Fishman's first observation was the lack of ability on the part of the students to grasp ideas from a textbook. In a way, he has to spoon feed the text, but on the other hand, they won't do any permanent good if they can't develop a little independent thinking among the students". [...] "The bookstore carried practically nothing but textbooks; only Gandhi's autobiography and five or six other paperbacks were available." ... "library ... inadequate ... donated stock".
            In 1962, Fishman wrote "An economic plan for disarmament" for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mar 01, 1962; Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 37-38, listed on one of Keele library's two on-line catalogues, although it only made it onto one of them. The title is a bit of a joke; it's a political journal and might have prompted the idea of a "keele list" of a hierachy of academic journals used to sort the next job applicants to be economics professor.
            In 1962, he won a Ford Foundation fellowship to work with Nicholas Kaldor in the applied economics department at Cambridge. He returned to England as senior economics lecturer at Warwick University (1967-69) before becoming professor at Keele. - obituary by Nina Fishman
            Minority staff are often expected to be better at their jobs than people who get a job by fluke and serve their time; this quote about a philosophy teacher at Colorado backs-up Fishman's daughter's story that he got an unfair dismissal because of his politics, rather than spoon-feeding the text of Samuelson's text book, which he should have been sacked for. There was also the summons to a Senate Committee reported as before Senator Todd, headlined "professors answer red tinge" in the local paper, which sent a photographer. They told him that Fishman is the bald one at the front who looks like Phillip Larkin, but from my studies I know that Fishman is the one in tweed and serious specs at the back. The one trying to look like he's just come over from the UK to read the weather forecast. Howard Higman is the one in the middle. I don't know how to look-up the report to the US Senate Subcommittee that these professors were summoned to rebut. If anyone knows the link I hope they can add it as a comment to this blog post.

            I don't know if this Getty Images embedded picture shows; click on the link if not. It shows a meeting of Senator Todd's equaivalent to the McArthy Committee in Congress, reported in the Denver Post as "Professors Answer Red Tinge"

            Fishman might have been summoned by mistake. Al Fishman, who shared some political interests, was an activist who criticised Senator Todd, but not a college teacher; Les Fishman was the Economics professor who the Colorado state university kept in the background on research projects and organising committees and encouraged to go to the UK. There were no further summonses and Senator Todd dropped-out of politics a few years later. The next piece of work was a report for the defence department on the re-employment of defence workers, published in 1968. It combined research from three different tyre companies and their redundant staff, and was written by a team headed by Fishman when he was not in the UK. There's a copy in an archive at Warwick Uni library. The archive at Warwick there records plans of a statistics laboratory from 1965 and a folder of press releases about 1968 states that it opened. This would have been a new generation of computers with reel-to-reel tape recorders and punched paper instead of punched cards in racks. They would have had teletype keyboards and the odd cathode ray screen. Fishman never mentions a computer again. Maybe he spilt coffee on it and was barred for life. Academics were asked to write something in honour of Les Fishman for the launch of the Fishman Bursary. There isn't much to go-on. I've put together what I can find on another page. One claimed to have found a good Fishman article from 1967 but doesn't give a reference. Maybe it was his inaugural lecture at Keele Uni, bound together with something similar and called "The Interconnected Economy" at £14.95 on Amazon. The paper referred-to is on the effects on the US economy of ending the Vietnam War, which I guess was something that genuinely interested Fishman after serving in the forces himself in the 1940s and then coming-out against war in the 1960s. I guess the same interest drew him to survey redundant tyre workers, to demonstrate how much the US economy could adjust to loss of military work. In 1969 someone from Warwick Uni in the UK tried co-writing something about council car clubs with him . I expect he added the algebra and co-operated on thoughts about how average costs of a car are lost to those who buy one and use it anyway. I can't remember him using phrases like "community centre" that come-up in the text. You need a special depressed tone of voice to say "community centre"; Fishman's style was more a style of pretended previous thought.

            1969-88: Leslie Fishman's bottom gets a job at Keele University

            Somehow, Fishman bluffed his way into a short period at Warwick Uni. where he lasted two years and then looked employable when applying to set-up a department at Keele under the constraint of having less than half a students' time and taking subject-switchers after their foundation year. Someone has written a history of Keele which says that a lot of applicants turned-down jobs like this when they realised what they'd applied-for. It was a job that would only attract someone who  needed a job, someone who had always wanted to be a professor, and someone with a miraculous ability to look like an academic star rather than any ordinary job applicant who might have taught A-level at the college over the road and done the job a lot better. Fishman was all three, or all four - he had taught at a college for teenages in Idaho but it was supposed to be a degree course. He had also met the big names of american nerdy cold-war untrue economics and read their journals, he loved being a professor and he badly needed a job. He was also named as someone who did some work for Colorado State getting employment statistics while at Colorado State University and considered not safe to leave near students, and he should have had experience with computer stats. A memorial lecture states that he wrote a good article about the economic costs of Vietnam, which was not published on any of the sites listed by Jstor - maybe it wasn't published at all.

            Fishman's experience was a McJob at UCLA Berkley cramming students for a business administration course, two years at a college for older teenagers that started running the odd degree course (A-level in UK terms), a period based at Colorado of which two years are now remembered of him teaching, and two years at Warwick University. So he had a knack of holding down teaching jobs for two years, but not for applying for jobs; they had often been offered to him alongside government research contracts and a fellowship to do something-or-other at Oxford. His first permenant job had been one that not many other people would apply for, and Keele was similar because of the constraints of teaching such a compact course.

            A good applicant would offer a solution, nowadays under The Consumer Rights Act #49: "with reasonable care and skill 

            The solution would be to recognise previous student work at A-level and somehow build it into the degree course; to take advantage of the students' bredth of study by offerning inter-departmental courses and tutorials to extract students' broad ideas, and to teach computing in order to condense the statistics part of a standard course. Fishman had the experience to share courses with the American Studies department and Industrial Relations department. He had computer stats experience. Warwick Uni had just set-up a statistics lab in the new digital computer style, with videos to train anybody who was interested in how to use the software. Fishman in his streak of good luck had studied punched-cards and tables of correlated data based on obscure Fortran program's interpretations of them at University of Boulder, Colorado. If he had wanted to do his job and learn the next generation of technology, he could have done so. He had the access pass. He could just walk-in.

            On the other hand there was nobody in a stats lab to do the work for him; he would have to take unpaid time and initiative and learn a new skill if he wanted to use computers. He chose not to. Fishman had less experience running tutorials, which was a pity in the UK system where they are normal, and when teaching students on broad courses who have ideas from other departments. He could have learned the knack, but he chose not to, and nobody noticed. Fishman even got away without doing tutorials or learning to type on the office computer by the time I was there nineteen years later. This was the time of Educating Rita. Academics were in short supply. Failings could be blamed on the stupidity of un-schooled local students who, in turn, did not know what to expect because their parents hadn't done similar courses. It was possible to get through meetings with peer-review people from other colleges, because their courses were and are probably awful too. In 1975 someone co-wrote a journal article: Defendant Sentences as a Function of Attractiveness and Justification for Actions

            In a test of the hypotheses that ...

            (a) defendants who have high external justification for their behaviour would be sentenced less severely than defendants with low external justification and

            (b) an attractive defendant with low external justification would be sentenced more severely than an unattractive defendant, ...

            60 American college students were randomly assigned without regard to sex to one of four treatments generated by two types of defendant descriptions (attractive vs. unattractive) and by two levels of defendant external justification (high vs. low: i.e., unspecified). Results confirmed both the predicted main effect for external justification (p < .05) and the defendant characteristics by external justification interaction (p < .05). Attractive defendants, therefore, were not inevitably treated more leniently than unattractive defendants.
            The next twenty years were spent on an economic experiment. How long can economics teachers avoid the sullen stares of subject-mixing students who know how badly economics is taught compared to other subjects? Subject mixing was new to the UK. The better reasons for sullen stares are still not clear to economists, so they were probably less clear then. In 1984 a member of staff wrote a sane textbook, covering the subjects that economics students might want to study, and Les Fishman is thanked in the acknowledgements for reading a draft, as are students from the author's tutorial group at the time, but Fishman continued to teach what he thought he had to teach - "we have to teach this stuff in order to call this an economics degree", was his phrase, as though he knew. "This stuff" was macro-economics from his memories of the Samualson textbook using excerpts from something more modern like Begg, micro-economics from Laidler, and two hours a week of manual statistics. The bits in Begg that said that the traditional bits were untrue were left-out. There was another textbook Fishman knew about and probably had on his office shelf, next to the un-read sales brochures for Instat software. The book is still mentioned as a classic and covers the subjects I thought I had signed-up to study when I began an economics course, but was not allowed to study. The link is to a transcript free to read online. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix INTRODUCTION II




            PART THREE: WAYS OUT?

            10. WHAT WENT WRONG? 187 11. INDUSTRIAL RECOVERY: THE POLICY PROBLEMS 201 12. BEHIND THE JAPANESE MIRACLE 213 13. RECOVERY 234 REFERENCES 241 INDEX 245 Nobody - not even external examiners - asked questions of the main course like

            • Your prospectus has a lot about "Quantitative Methods". Methods of what?
            • For 19 years you have pretended that computers don't exist in your stats teaching. That's a deliberate scam isn't it? There's no other word for it is there?

              Your secretary has Supercalc stats functions on this computer. Did you know that? Do you know how to turn it on? Do you have a computer in the department library? No? What do you have? Those ones for one exercise - really? So why do you still teach manual computing for two hours a week and keep Supercalc in the office?
            • What was that workbook with examples about broiler chickens? You mean they have "recitations" in US college courses? What's this thing you call a "class"? Really?
            • There are about 4 million people unemployed. Unemployment is the subject of your published books. Why do you think there are 4 million people unemployed? Why do you think so many factories have closed?
            • What do your students think of the course? Apart from showing they like it by passing the exam? Is that all you know about them? Can we see the exam scripts. Take this one: do you know the person's name? Anyone? So you don't remember them from tutorials? You mean you don't do tutorials? In that case, can you line them up outside your office door so we can see them? You mean they went home early? Do you know what any of them are doing next? None? Get some back for a Viva.
            • Who is the prime minister? What floor are we on? Can you count back in 7s ?
            I doubt they asked that last question because in 1987 an economics degree course that taught theories in case anyone thinks of a use for them was quite normal, as it is now. The people who wrote the Levacic and Rebmann textbooks had held-down jobs at Open University and Middlesex Uni. Teachers don't start from relevant problems and find skills to solve those problems; it worked the other way around. Like teaching Latin and Greel in Victorean schools. There was a surplus of people with useless skills, so they were easy to hire as teachers, so a subject was taught even more to the next generation. The next person to get the Keele job was an expert in a new thing called "game theory" with a CV about studying maths. Fishman may have been a real person in the 1950s for real reasons but I don't remember him teaching in any useful way. I remember he had a good style and looked like a father figure to some people. He talked with glee. He liked to interrupt his own slow drawl, like a comedian, which was good. He professed how V-neck jumpers came-out in better colours every year. He professed that market researchers sliced data in different ways to get over-precise results, for example at Ford. He mentioned the Ford Motor Company of Detroit a few times, so I think he'd read a book about it or something. He stopped talking half-way through a micro-economics workbook example sentence - about Broiler chickens and marginal cost - because, as he explained, it was five o'clock. He professed that as you get older you find that nothing works quite so well. He professed that as a governor you need to maintain defence and after that comes welfare. He showed a bit of glee at discovering a Nigerian economics text book. He professed that Wedgwood had left the potters trade association, leading to rising sales costs for the other big potter companies. That's about all I remember because he did not hold the tutorials or provide the feedback to students as reasonably expected to do for high payment payment of salary from my taxes, I believe. Fishman interrupted a macro-economics revision lecture to say "we have to teach this stuff to call this an economics degree course in less than half your time". A lecture about the ISLM model of demand management in a closed economy. Fishman did not seem a real person in the way he taught economics in the 1980s. His 1950s Samuelson textbooks had not mentioned anything interesting about unemployment, so he didn't in 1984. By the last year in his career he used an A-level textbook called Begg which tried to add notes about current affairs and up to date research. He didn't tell us about them; they weren't in the exam. His colleagues pushed a bit into the course about differing ways to measure unemployment, which was controversial at the time, but I don't remember a single word from Fishman. He was on his last year of work. He could take phone calls in his seminars. He could have taught us that snails ran the universe to see if us exam-flunkers showed any interest in our sullen stares but no. He did not say a word about catastrophic economic policies that effected all the rest of us in the room. I hope some keen historian dredges-up the archives about this man to find-out how to stop the mistake happening again, because the problem is so much like the problem of people going to Oxford or Cambridge and studying PPE and then going-on to cause unhappiness from bad economics. It's a problem of people, on compacted economics courses that nobody much remembers, learning bad habits.

            Economics teaching before student feedback - extra question for Keele:
            A recession caused by bad economists has wrecked a chunk of the economy, along with students' job prospects and those of their parents.
            £32,720 of tax money was paid to this economics department to research what happened next; how people got jobs if it all.
            The teacher doesn't mention a word about this. He doesn't run a course based on his research; he doesn't ask students to swap ideas about jobs. He doesn't give a lecture about whatever the £32,720 of tax money paid-for. Is this OK?
            Definitely agree
            Mostly agree
            Neither agree nor disagree
            Mostly disagree
            Definitely disagree
            Words fail me

            1. Careers

            Implausible but pretty diagram showing how much more graduates earn compared to how much they loose while studying
            "You haven't provided an economics course" was a sentence that through my head as I realised the situation, looking at this man who had ripped me off for years. I had finished a degree course, gone home to my parents with no job prospects, until economics students were called back for something called "Vivas".

            I made the 160 mile trip back to Keele Campus and stood again among all the students I'd never got to know in the economics corridor. A door opened about a foot, and someone inside said "No Vivas" before closing the door. That's where an economics degree ends.

            Wondering around the empty campus, I was surprised to see the man himself, and he looked surprised to see me. I may have been one of the last students he spoke to before retirement, straight out of his third year teaching group. That was a nice thing about 1980s teaching compared to what happened later:

            "a teacher ... previously had a clear idea of how any one particular course fitted within a departmental degree programme, why students were taking it and what their background was, a module now assembled a random collection of students for the duration of that module, who then continued along separate paths after it had ended" - Tribe 2014

            Third year tutors were the ones who students remembered. This was the third time Fishman ever tried to speak to me, and I'll never forget what he said. No. I have forgetten. He might have asked "have you got any plans?". Rather like asking after someone's health as the Titanic tilts further and further. But the gist of it was the same as the second time he spoke to me - a nervous pause while he realised that he didn't know my name, then "Let me see - how are you getting on?"

            I was a surprised 22 year-old; I didn't know how to tell a 64 year-old that he ought to be on Rogue Traders. I just said "OK, thanks", and walked-on to voluntary work, self-taught job searching skills and two years' on benefits.. I didn't have a chance to put this rip-off merchant in the stocks and throw rotten fruit at him. I didn't realise that the meeting about Vivas might have included people from other colleges who had told Fishman what I didn't dare: retire now, or we close the department. I didn't realise that this department with extremes of good and bad was not the worst; all the later discoveries about Fishman's dad being a Menchavik from Russia with furniture manufacturing interests, and Fishman being an exile from bad teaching in the USA, were not the main point even if I had known them. Other people on other economics courses found their teachers just as bad as the ones who advised government on how to put our dads out of work; most economists were as bad as Fishman. This is a slightly complicated sentence but you get the drift. When my father's business failed because of negligent pompous economists and evil newspaper proprietors spouting lies, he tried working as a tradesman mending sash cord windows, and going for hard-to-fill jobs at job agencies in West London. Like Les Fishman, he wore old tweed jackets and V-necks over shirts and ties, and had become become a pleasant cartoon character in the way he spoke to people. He couldn't learn new tricks like how to use the new Oyster Bay MsDos software for HP Finance when he was used to the sheet-metal accounting machine and the cards, but he could get the work done for him. My father's memory couldn't bring things to mind in a sharp way either; he tried working as a researcher with a debt collecting and detective agency in Brentford, and as credit controller for Bristol cars in Chiswick, then a taxi garage called Mann and Overton, but he didn't last long at any of them. He did find a job that suited him, teaching an adult education class how to research family history. There was a short free induction course for adult education teachers from the council, and as long as enough people turned-up he got paid. Familiy history courses are better than most economics courses because they teach students how to look things up for themselves. When he died, I should have sent obituaries to the big papers to say he'd been a towering academic just to see if any got published. My father also benefited from failure, as did all the MPs and newspaper proprietors and opinion-formers who lived in London. The industrial areas of the UK could provide fewer jobs. Property values therefore went-up in London as people migrated to find work and my dad had held-on to his house. Opinion-formers in London tended to think that Thatcher had done a good job; Tony Blair set-up a system for the Bank of England to carry-on a similar monetary policy, and the system still counts as sane among journalists MPs and economists. Looking at accounts of Fishman's work, he stopped working a year earlier than my CV says, meaning that I was 21 and fiddled my CV later-on to conceal two years' unemployment. If he retired at age 64, and accounts differ about him retiring in 87 or 88, it may be that he got a salary for a year from Keele University. Fishman went-on to a funded survey of the experiences of redundant Michelin tyre workers, kept in touch with a few academic contacts, and would have had a final salary pension based on earnings over double the average wage. Like other economists, he got an obituary as a towering figure of reason and inspiration.

            Economics was an odd subject in presenting itself as an introduction to some technical career-enhancing skill, and in presenting opinions about unemployment to students as part of the syllabus. I never learned what that career-enhancing skill was meant to be, nor how the graphs untangle cause and effect.

            Take two shool leavers aged twenty-odd. One has an idea of a craft career like plastering or cab driving; how to get qualifications, who to meet to get jobs or how to apply, whether the work suits them. Later-on they might do other things that are better-paid again, and can be done while a bit less fit.

            The other twenty-odd school-leaver has an idea of another craft career like accountancy or law. Exactly the same applies. The only difference is that there are elements of craft qualifications built-in to some university degrees. You can do parts of your accountancy qualification at uni, or parts of a law society entrance qualification. Or not; I don't know which is better.

            Both these two twenty-odds are likely to have high pay at age 40.

            You could make-up stories about other 20-odds with less idea what could work for them or what they want to do. They're likely to be paid less at age 40, whether or not they go to college. In a recession, there are more of these stories than usual; there are areas with very few work or career options; there are parents who's experience is no longer any help, there are patterns of moving around the globe or living in institutions that separate students from ideas of what works for them.

            I think the idea that economics degrees are a good investment comes from US text books, speaking in effect to the parent who pays for a private higher education system at a time of conscription and a shortage of graduaets. One tutor quoted, as an example of how bizarre the Samuelson textbook was, the page on which it says there is no such thing as long-term involuntary unemployment; that's the kind of society the Samuelson textbook was written-for.

            Postwar UK unemployment (excluding school leavers). Graph going off the top of the usual scale from textbook page 440The Begg textbook tries to be a bit more subtle but on the same theme. On page 254, figure 11.3, it suggests a bright future for graduates on a graph of average gross weekly earnings in 1980 prices for people with degrees, A-levels or no formal qualifications. If you read further to page 440 part 4, you'll see another hint about 1980s students' job prospects. The textbook does not relate one to the other. It is like an encylopedia, with unrelated things on different pages.

            And there was never any job called "Economist" for which a degree qualifies a student as a phamacy degree qualifies a student to be a pharmacist. There is no application of an orphan stats course and a load of undtrue theories. All if this is obvious on other courses like English or Politics. They don't qualify you do talk or vote. Economcis was unusual in presenting itself a bit like a phamacy course but in a more vague way, as though this repeated introductory information lead somewhere.

            Nothing suggests that an economics degree allows entry to a professional organisaton like the ones for pharmacy or accounting or the law society, with legal privilages to do certain jobs. But something along those lines is suggested by the boring technical nature of the course and the language used like "introductory".

            It takes many years to become a complete economist with a professional's grasp of the subject. Most of you probably have no wish to become professional economists  ... the basic issues ... framework of analysis ... many of the conclusions, can be understood very quickly in an introductory course. Our emphasis on applications is designed to convicnce you that the economics you are learning is about the real world. It is not just a set of textbook excercises
             \- Begg Fischer and Dornbush, page xix "to the student" including A-level students
            The biggest section of the Begg textbook is about something called microeconomics, usually without a context. The chaptor headings suggest factor markets of land labour capital and something or-other; I think there are four.

            The next biggest section is something called "Macroeconomics" but really about demand management; it only has four pages about the supply side of the economy which clearly needed attention. Then you go to university to study the same thing with more algebra, and then it ends.

            Another difference between Economics degrees and English or other subjects is that the bigwigs of Economics careers help mess-up your career prospects with their obviously stupid ideas. You don't go through an English degree knowing that there is some professor of English somewhere who has advises the government on how to make 20,000 people a month redundant. The textbook doesn't apologise for this or say how many economists lie, or are taken too seriously for their own good because of a job title; it just  says that there is normative and positive economics. One of them can include lying or being stupid; the other is more technical. The course doesn't get to the stage where you can argue back against bad economists on technical grounds, and, even if it did, a lot of the statistical data that would help you argue a case isn't released to the public. The revenue and customs act keeps it secret. There are no input-output tables for England. Unemployment data was counted in a different way from the mid 80s. At that time, even the treasury model of the UK economy was secret.
            As a result of my course, I believe that I have improved my career prospects.
            Good advice is available for making career choices. Good advice is available on further study opportunities
            This is the kind of thing Professor Fishman wrote about job-seekers.

            On the supply side, rationalizing the labor market requires considerable knowledge of actual labor supply coming on to the market, and that which will be coming-on during any transition period. The informational channels linking the supply and demand sides of the labor market are quite undeveloped, considering the sophistication of our industrial society. Employers and employees tend to be brought together largely through informal channels and one at a time. That is, one person is matched at a time with one job, The process today does not consider trying to make an optimum match of 1000 new job applicants with 1000 job openings. Instead, the applicants are sent, on at a time, to the highest job on their aspiration list, or on the job counselors list for which he matches them. The employer then ranks the applicants by some standards (educational, experience, or a aptitude tests), and will tend to take the highest from among the applicants. This permits premium employers to skim the cream off the labor market, or what they think is the cream, This certainly does not result in a maximum or optimum match from society's point of view. For such an optimum match, considerably more information is required, as well as sophisticated computer application. The final dimension of the labor market is the actual decision making by workers and employers to accept the terms of employment. The influences here reflect alternatives available to both parties, as well as such considerations as hardship, career aspirations, and geographic preferences.
            This is what Professor Fishman's economics department did. It summoned students all at once, back to the campus after exams in case there were extra interviews called "vivas" to hold. In the last week or two of term, the only reason to stay at Keele was to collect a fancy printed degree certificate. There was a poster by the mail bins in the Students Union, implying that you needed to pay £25 to get a degree certificate. I guessed, rightly, that this was a bluff. The registry will confirm that I have a degree without payment. Some people stayed-on to collect their certificates at a PR ceremony in a local town - the sort of thing that's good to invite a granny to, but otherwise a bit daft and expensive.

            Most students had now left to become unemployed 20-somethings based all-over the UK, realising how little a Keele Economics degree prepared for anything else, and thinking of volunteer work in the two years' likely unemployment before Community Programme places were available. Life was not as the textbook said.
            "students run-up overdrafts knowing that, as rich economists, they can pay ... back later". (Begg, p541 - not quite serious - the serious bit is on page 253 below).
            The problem was that Fishman's generation of teachers had opposite career needs to my generation of students. They had to avoid being summoned to the McArthy Committee or having some excuse made-up to end their teaching career, as happened to other teachers at University of Colorado. It would be the same teaching in Turkey now. So they taught theory first, leading vaguely towards practical application that never happened. They taught at a distance from students, as though teaching a hard science rather than a social science. Some of them kept their careers and ordered lots of textbooks, maintaining the tradition of how the subject is taught.
            The colleges were funded by parents, so it helped to big-up the career advantages of going to college at a time when there were fewer of them.

            Students' career needs, I think, are for practice to come before theory and detirmine which theories are used. This is as true of someone who wants general knowledge and life experience, or someone who wants specific tips and tricks for a financial job. After being a student, any job seems bizarre and any capacity to do the job seems improbable. What did other people do? I don't know.

            There was a small careers and counselling office at the college, but nothing specific to economics or on the scale of Keele student services now. At least two people - probably a handful or people. That's embarassingly too many in a way, because people from the mining village, working under the campus, had no access nor equivalent service nor tax rebate. Then as now it was common to leave school at sixteen, so some people paid tax from the age of sixteen to twenty, knowing that other people were getting secondary schools and college places from the money. It was one of those un-stated issues that ecnomists had moved onto a separate subject of social policy rather than talk about.

            Thinking of the careers office, it seemed rude to go-in and tease the one or two staff by saying "I do not know the rate of unemployment: can you break the news to me"? I remember juke box regulars and empty disco favourites as Talking Heads "Road to Nowhere", and Iggy Pop's "Passenger". It was impossible to miss the pointlessness of going to the careers office. So I went-in, to ask what other people did. The reply was that graduates who didn't know what to do often emigrated to work as TEFL teachers, and some tried to be managers at McDonalds. Nowadays there's a checklist for economics career choices online. Some colleges like UCLA now have email lists of invites to work for management consultants. I have signed-up to the UCLA one and get offers of internships and short-term jobs at management consultancies. Boris Johnson did something similar. Last week I even over-heard the process from the next-door restaurant table, during a recession, in Lisbon, which is something that's hard to reference in a footnote, but true. The economics MA crowd from some university discussed which modelling software was easiest to use, and how one of them had even got an interview for some job. The questions were "how are interest rates, exchange rates, and inflation rates related?" and "how do you value a bond?". If a Keele graduate had applied in 1987, the employer would have thought "we had a Keele applicant before: they don't use computers and their teacher doesn't know there's a recession. No". That's a pity because, if I had known about that kind of job, I could have had a stab at the other two questions. My dad had been valued promises to pay HP finance payments for years, so this was one of the few areas of life I knew about. Keele Economics Department did not mention careers to students. I don't like to think that the problem was employers who suck-up to some colleges and ignore others, but if employers did dislike Keele graduates then the college could have taught self-employment skills. They did not. At the time, we knew it was going to be hard to get a job, but we didn't know how to apply for a job. Few of us had known each other; we didn't talk to each other on the course; this might have been a safe time for us to share job ideas now that we knew we would never have to meet whichever fellow student again. Keele economics staff had some idea about the job market from their research into redundant tyre workers.
            The results suggest that displacement took place in the manufacturing sector of the local economy, but that self-employment was important in easing the “dynamic” adjustment of the post-redundancy labour market. Policy makers should recognise that a part of the adjustment process is the use of self-employment as a temporary employment state.
            We came back. I'd gone to my parents 200 miles away. Students travelled a lot by hitchhiking in those days - specially at Keele which is named after a service station on the M6. To digress, one of my lifts had a job in artificial intelligence at some university college. I asked what he thought of students. He didn't light-up in happiness but he said they're the purpose of the college; they're what makes it work, they add variety, and I got the impression he half-liked students even after working with them. People in other Keele departments would have given similar answers. At our destination, as summoned to Keele Economics Department, we stood or sat on the floor in the office corridor. There was a crowd, but there was nothing for ex-students to say. There were no special employment deals for graduates that would want a low-grade degree, even in good times, and the Keele course taught by cramming for a low-grade degree. There was no student grant for post-graduate study, and, if there had been, colleges tended to want a 2.1 before they'd take the money. Nobody, I am sure, had found work in the pottery towns and managed to start living like grown-ups nearby, dispite our fading youth.

            An office door opened by a foot to reveal half a man with a beard. "No vivas", the beard said, and the door closed.

            That was about the end of my time as a Keele student and a time when I began to realise that other people had picked-up craft skills that were entirely absent from the Keele campus; it was designed to lift people out of practicality into the stratosphere from which we could shine-back like stars at the lucky practical people below. The expectation of people who founded grammer schools and universities was that there would always be lots of UK craft industries and exports and home consumption and that what was needed was a few more graduates. So in 1987 there were people qualified to be scafolders and monkey-around. Or police constables. Or plasterers. I had absolutely no knowledge of jobs or how to get them, nor how to make a factory which I am no good at but keep thinking about, nor how to get the fictional job of economist which statistics show is well-paid but I don't know where. There was no strange short course in how Steelite crockery is made, what factories are willing to make a batch if you make a compatible Stacklite range, how much the moulds cost, and how much you can do in your mum's living room before the council planning people complain. Sales points could be that it's made in a democractic welfare state - the UK - and that it's a penny cheaper with slight promotion to searches ebay and similar sites where the crocs are bought and sold second hand, so they hold their value better than Steelite. That was the end of my Keele Economics course, organised by Fishman, and I only discovered by accident later-on that it was the end of his time as a teacher. There was nothing like a group photo with awkward chat, no cheap wine in plastic cups or a nervous meeting of near-strangers in a pub. It made Kieth Smith's group seem special in comparison. The campus was so empty that staff ventured onto it, looking startled if they met a student face they knew. Fishman knew some of the Cameroonian group and I suppose he was on campus to say goodby to them. I might have been the last active student he spoke to in that last year of his career, and I'll never forget what he said to me. No. I have forgotten what he said to me but I will quote the gist of it. He spotted me as a former tour guide bus passenger student and felt the need to say something. This was the third time he ever spoke to me, and so worth a third of whatever part of the education budget was allocated to 1:1 professorial sayings. He showed no shame at what he had done, nor any idea what my name was. He just did an impersonation of kindly old man:
            "let me see - how are you getting on?".

            2 Course Content & Structure

            All of the compulsory modules are relevant to my course.
            There is an appropriate range of options to choose from on my course.
            The modules of my course form a coherent integrated whole

            Dead languages

            Two hours a week were spent teaching manual statistical computation, just as the rest of the world first got their first home computers with 2D shareware stats software available, and after other universities had used stats software for fifteen years.
            "Econometrics is the branch of economics devoted to measuring relationships using economic data. The details need not concern us here, but the idea is simple enough. Having plotted the points describing the data, a computer works out where to draw the line to minimise the dispersion of pounts around the line. [...]

            After some practice most people get used to working with two dimensional diagrams [...] a few gifted souls can even draw diagrams in three dimensions. Fortunately, computers can work in 10 or 20 dimensions  at once, even though we cannot imagine what this looks like [...] the tube fare on one axis, traffic congestion on a fourth, tube revenue on a fifth, plot all these variables at the same time, and fit or work-out the average relation between tube revenue and each of these influences" - Economics British Edition, Begg, 1984, p35
            Despite reading that in a textbook in 1984, I have never seen a computer do stats calculations in more than 2D. Functions like that look easier to learn, nowadays, partly from the instructions of Libre Office Calc and I might do it some time, but the Keele course wasn't much related to the practice of how to do it. We didn't work in a context, with real numbers. I can say from experience that it's easy to forget stats skills if they're taught out of context, and it's hard to imagine going for a job interview as a researcher if you can't say "I did this with these stats at college" or some example of work done.

            The pattern was to dive-in to the gist of a theory, then go-on to the next one, then forget the whole thing after graduating.

            cartoon picture of a dinosoar with spots to illustrate statistical needs to measure whatever correlation, devation or variation mean
            This blog post bites dispute the cute picture. If you want to a number for how fat Sigma the dinosoar is - a standard number that also applies to cows - you can work out the average spot distance from the tummy, or you can square each distance, average them, then square root, just to show-off, and call it the standard deviation. For some reason I forget there is a minus 1 or something like that in the formula. This works for cows as well but they are all more of a brick shape. If you can't find a dinosoar, try it on a cow.

            At the same time, it wasn't great at teaching the underlying principals. This is roughly what I remember.

            You can measure how fat a spotted dinosaur is by averaging measured spot distance from the tummy. Average usually means the same as it did at O level and in the Foundation Year, and is just as hard to calculate as an excercise with a calculator. There's more use of specialisted words words like Median and Variance, Deviation and Correlation, which are also just as hard as last time to calculate - specially for someone who was not aware of having signed-up to study them out of context; the mind wonders.

            The same technique can show how a list of points on a graph vary from any line, like a row of spotted dinosaurs side by side and seen from above, but you need a computer do do that for a lot of numbers and we didn't have the use of one at Keele because students aren't important. Dinosoars have a pretty normal distribution, but the spots on animals near Keele are more likely a cow distribution, or a load of spots, or a row close to another line. There's something called a Poisson Distribution too. As a social science researcher with a job, I suppose that's what you do. Spots on animals may be useful as a teaching aid, but it turns-out that some of the stats text books were written by people who really did measure cows, using machines at Idaho state college where Fishman got his first full-time teaching job.
            The lab in the Department of Agriculture inspired two Iowans, George Snedecor and Henry A. Wallace, to experiment with punched-card statistical computations. Henry Wallace eventually rose to prominence as the Vice President of the United States, but during the 1920s, he was the publisher of his family’s farm journal, Wallaces’ Practical Farmer. He was also a self-taught statistician and was interested in the interplay of biology and economics in farm management. During the 1910s, he learned the methods of correlation studies and least squares regression by reading Yule’s book, An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (London: Griffin, 1911). Finding in that book no easy method for solving the normal equations for regression, Wallace devised his own, using an idea that Gauss had applied to an astronomical problem. -
            You can also show-off by squaring the tummy distances before averaging them, then taking a square root. Maybe the point of this is to drill students in use of their slide rules before calculators came-in from Sinclair in the 70s, or something to do with those mechanical tabulating machines used at Idaho State College. You show-off the formula by putting it in shorthand which I find distracting and I think distracts teachers too.

            The faults of this teaching method are that you realise that you don't know why anything should be squared before averaging and square-rooting, and why there is a minus-one among other things in the formula. People who have done Nuffield science courses are relatively normal and want to know. Without knowing the reason for something, it's much harder to remember it apart from anything else. In Nuffield Physics we experimented with weights on springs, noted wave motion, and were guided in how to apply the same idea to electronic waves or microwaves. There was no need for a lecture phrased in algebra.

            Photo: Colorado State University beige powerpoint

            economics department, slide 21 of 30 to illustrate teaching

            from 1976-86 as part of their 50th anniversary powerpoint.

            The bloke's cave painting looks nice & interesting in

            context, but the algebra suggests lack of context; that

            this stuff was taught before the problem it could solve

            Why care if SC beta = sum (y-x beta) squared?
            If someone had asked if "compulsory modules are relevant to my course", I would have said that the two hours a week of manual stats classes were nothing to do with analysis of data; I could not apply them to any problem that needed to be solved; they were probably dull for the teacher and the students. Tradition dictates that the person with the beard has to teach this stuff and the one at Colorado State University in the 70s has done quite well with a 3 dimensional diagram for the photo, but however good the teacher it's still algebra taught before solving economic problems rather than algebra taught in order to solve economic problems. That's how a good subject gets to be ticky-tacky-fied into funny shorthand and repeated too many times. Not that I have any idea what M= I-X (X' X) - 'X' MX=0, M2=M(XB+E) = (MXB + M.... SC B) = SUM (Y-XB) squared SCR = SYN (YCB - XB) means. It could be rubbish written for the photographer or it could make sense. After doing other subjects like a Nuffield science A level and an art and a social science, I tended to think it was rubbish but was prepared to give it a try: I must have understood something like this once, but it is hard to remember without the reasoning behind it.

            The problem continues through the decades, possibly because so many maths graduates are looking for work that maths techniques get taught before any application they are meant to solve. Even if there is a problem that they solve. The London School of Economics can specify whatever kind of student it wants to teach, because so many apply. They have a page on - or whatever the equivalent page is this year. under study > undergraduate > degree programs > economics.

            It mentions that they don't really want people with economics A-level, which raises the question of whether they should use the word "economics" in their course title, because this is obviously something else masquerading.

            "a mathematically rigorous approach ... therefore very demanding of quantitative and analytical ability and interest. This should be taken into consideration when deciding whether this is the most suitable degree programme for you. If you have taken a gap year, it will be important for you to review the mathematics that you have learnt previously, in preparation for beginning studies at LSE. "
            "A level Mathematics (or equivalent) is a compulsory requirement for all programmes within the Economics Department at LSE."
            "An additional qualification in further mathematics, at any level, is generally preferable. "
            They pepper the page with balancing items - clauses that say they shouldn't loose sight of the real world and that the maths is eventually applied - just take it on trust they imply. They also state that a lot of their students are post-graduate, so maybe you need to take a second degree course to recover from the first degree course

            Students give a bad review on unistats..

            The way to avoid bad reviews, I guess, would be to write "This is not an eonomics course" on the prospectus.

            Something prompts students to rate LSE as among the bad economics courses on the list, and clues on a lot of the badly-reviewed economics courses suggest that they are a load of maths presented for its own sake which may or may not solve a real problem, and if it does that might be on a post-graduate course. The page refers to real data and real facts but the college still gets a terrible review.

            Non facts

            For some reason, the stats teaching was not done with real stats or none that I can remember; there were plenty of memorable stats around in the mid 1980s about youth unemployment in the midlands or factory closures, but I only remember a few basic national figures being quoted. Tables of data from the central statistical office existed in the department library. They were not used for teaching; I remember only workbook exercises. The person standing at the end of the room was evidence of how badly the US college system works under political pressure, but we students didn't know. He had also worked in a furniture factory, but he didn't use furniture for his micro-economic excercises, nor data from the Price's National Teapots in the nearest town, or Silverdale Colliery down the hill. No. We did whatever workbook examples were in some textbook from the states.

            Untrue theories

            "The trouble with the textbooks in economics is that they contain things we economists know to be wrong." - Diane Coyle, professor of economics, University of Manchester "6 knowledge awareness & understanding of historical, political, institutional international, social, and environmental contexts in which specific economic analysis is applied." - Quality Assurance Agency benchmark
            Economics textbooks ignore a large parts of the economy. The compulsory insurance part of the economy is redacted. Begg does not have a chapter called "Welfare State", followed by a few pages of blacked-out type. That would be silly. Economics journals are also open to articles in their category I of Health, Education and Welfare, with the "Welfare" heading covering less than 1% of articles in the late 20th century.

            I. Health, Education, and Welfare

            I00 General

            I1 Health

            I10 General

            I11 Analysis of Health Care Markets

            I12 Health Behavior

            I13 Health Insurance, Public and Private

            I14 Health and Inequality

            I15 Health and Economic Development

            I18 Government Policy • Regulation • Public Health

            I19 Other

            I2 Education and Research Institutions

            I20 General

            I21 Analysis of Education

            I22 Educational Finance • Financial Aid

            I23 Higher Education • Research Institutions

            I24 Education and Inequality

            I25 Education and Economic Development

            I26 Returns to Education

            I28 Government Policy

            I29 Other

            I3 Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty

            I30 General

            I31 General Welfare, Well-Being

            I32 Measurement and Analysis of Poverty

            I38 Government Policy • Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

            I39 Other

            Ommitting Verse Three: the bit in the textbook that isn't taught

            At some schools, songs are sung of a faith groupey kind, with un-true lyrics that nobody pays attention to. One jingle is a bit ignorant about Darwin for example, and only mentions "bright and beutiful" things with faith advertising aimed at children. Then at verse three, even the faith groupeys think:"steady-on", and it is sung ommitting verse three:

            "The rich man in his castle; the poor man at his gate: god made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate."
            The "Welfare" chapter of  economic textbooks is treated the same way in UK I suppose; printed, not taught, but taken seriously in America. There are journal articles by one of Samualson's friends from the Algebra Club - I forget which one. Maybe Mr Arrow, who calculated internal rate or return or net present value or something like that which had probably been done before, but which he presented to an economic journal, wrapped in algebra.

            From a UK perspective, what's strange is that this un-read chapter doesn't mention the welfare state; it is based on work by people who lived in countries without any kind of social insurance system and make a great effort to pretend not to have heard of it.

            Fred "this and that" Pareto, an early twentieth century engineer and teacher in Italy and Switzerland who wrote several books about income distribution. He was well placed to write about the Prussian social insurance system which had been running for decades as he wrote, but, if he wrote about that, it's not what's quoted. He was such a fervant anti-communist that he came close to supporting Moussolini and was free to travel in Fascist Italy where - according to Wikipedia - the regime took to his ideas. An embarassing man to quote, but if he wrote things that were true that shouldn't be important.

            This and that theory : one students' guess
            A production-possibility frontier is an example of a Pareto Efficient Frontier. The connected line of red points represents Pareto optimal choices of production before the addition of point N.At a canteen, people have space on their plates for vegetables when walking past the self-service. Maximum helpings of vegetable one or vegetable two, measured by area, would form a straight line on a diagram like the one on the right. But most people have a middling combination, suggesting some preference for variety over clear decision.

            At a tile shop, when people want to re-pave their front paths, they have a similar choice of red tiles or dark tiles for example. A lot choose red and dark to form a pattern. But recent research done while walking down a street suggests that a lot of people have all-red or all-dark tiles, casting doubt on this theory's usefulness without specific context.

            A similar theory exists for production possiblity frontiers. It comes from another chapter. A kitchen that has frozen carrots and frozen peas may find it easier if people to have a bit of this and that, or be just as happy to serve all carrots or all peas if people want them. A tile factory might have some technical reason to make some of this and some of that, on some product lines, or they might be just as happy to make all red tiles or all dark tiles.
            It depends on the product line.

            I think this is about the limit of this-and-that theory.
            subject comes round-again somewhere, and there is a much better informed, reasonable account of Fred "this and that" Pareto in The British Economic Crisis, p 124

            Pareto Theory Number Two
            "all things bright and beautiful".

            His other qualification - other than algebra - was that he has no theory about national insurance system that sprung-up in Prussia in the 1860s and slowly in the UK after 1911, so his ideas were un-tainted by anything that might offend republican voters in the USA. He also disliked communists and was free to travel in Fascist Italy. Another writer who was imprisoned by the Fascist regime had time to write a book about how authority influences society, and had to make-up new jargon to try and avoid annoying anybody. His name was Gramsci and he came-up in the English course at Keele. I even bought the book but it's as thick as an Economics textbook and I sold it again unread (you make more money that way). But Gramsci probably has something to say about economics teachers and the like, where Pareto is just silent. The text book avoids mentioning social insurance systems. It uses a euphemism: "transfer payments", which happen in a single year, while social insurance payments happen over a life-cycle. The euphemism is good if you want to draw a diagram of how money flows-about in a year. Tax and Transfer both begin with "T"; "Transfer" is like negative tax. But nothing like a national insurance fund is allowed in this economy, or any sense that people have paid-in to the system at one age and are due money out as a right at another age. A mention of a long-term contract between a welfare state and taxpayers over time removes the idea that the very rich pay for the very poor, it raises the question of whether a monopoly insurance service can be cheaper, which it can, and it opens-up the question of what governments are for, as illustrated in other subjects that students study like history and politics.The textbook also avoids the problem of how you cut spending in such an economy if you're chancellor. You can't. A policy designed in text-book-land can recommend large cuts in spending to reduce the money supply, but what happens is that claims for benefits go-up, keeping public spending pretty-much the same. My 1984 Begg textbook has none of that, despite using the word "national insurance" on the same page as "transfer payments".
            • I would like to say that this is a muddle, or a mistake, but the muddle is neat and consistent when it also forgets to mention the role of tariffs in allowing workers to work with the extra minimum costs of a welfare state in competition with workers from Bangladesh.
            • It forgets to mention the idea of social clauses which are not inserted into tariffs for purposes like this but could be. It forgets to mention the strangeness of Samuelson's "Public Good" journal article, which implies from its name that there are few other reasons for public sector spending.
            • The Begg textbook does suggest a few other rather weird ones - the "Merit Good" and the annual decision of electors to promote equality by redistribution - but these are fairly obviously naff.
            After all this very neat forgetfulness, I suspect that the problem is not a muddle but a real disagreement between a textbook author and a lot of the electorate over a hundred years or more, with the text book author and similar economists on one side and the electorate on the other. These two compromises are very neat for maintaining textbook sales in West Virginia or Alabama or Bangladesh, or even for adding to the US edition for a UK readership as Begg did, but I don't think historians would agree that that's what national insurance does. As someone who did history O and A level, I think economists are a badly educated bunch.

            Times had moved-on since Economics could be summed-up in one textbook by one person in 1948. By 1984, the replacement textbook was 799 pages long because it described the usual news-speak theories, and then had little-read chapters later-on to say that the previous chapters were untrue. For example the diagram of graduate income, above, has a few notes added in the next page or so to say that in times of high unemployment, people study just to avoid unemployment, and that not all graduates find jobs. I found it hard to guess as a student whether the syllabus and exam were about the untrue theories or the true ones, but my choice of a more concise textbook and comments like "crap" in the margin suggest something uneasy. The essay about a "public good" was an odd choice. The theory attempts to explain why most governments provide a few public services beyond their natural activity of funding wars, pointy things, opera and circuses. Lighthouses are pointy. Ships, missiles, and aircraft are pointy. All this fits the pattern, but roads are not quite pointy in the same sense. Samuelson's theory was one of two things - I forget which: (1) it is daft to try to charge ship owners for lighthouses; charging is either impossible or disproportionate. Giant sea-curtains come to mind, or international taxes that are ignored in Panama. (2) there is no marginal cost to extra ships using the light. You will have to read the article to find out which of the two points he made, in order to get your essay marked correct. Skip the twiddly bits in italics: they're just for show. Taking historical examples in the UK, apart from lighthouses, it's too complicated, if not impossible, to make all roads toll-roads, so they're best provided from taxes. It's such a limited definition of what can be done best by the public sector that, taught alone, it can only be a deliberate attempt to confuse students. Students already have clearer ideas from history courses, so they know it's stupid. The teacher has a narrower education but thinks it's stupid, but it is still taught. My hunch is that it is part of the consensus built-up around US Federal spending on arms as an alternative to funding a welfare state - specially strong during conscription and the Vietnam war. The rest of the course was spent on largely un-true textbook theories about the labour market or monetary policy. Economics is distinct in this way. I doubt engineers study upward gravity in the first year and go-on, if the course is long enough, to study downward gravity right at the end. The effect of tax, spending, and interest rates in a closed economy, called the ISLM curve in the jargon, is an untrue theory when applied to an open economy. Higher interest rates effect the exchange rate, causing imports to flood-in and closing chunks of UK manufacturing. On the other hand, if you find a way to boost demand, imports flood-in as well.
            "The model was developed by John Hicks in 1937, and later extended by Alvin Hansen, as a mathematical representation of Keynesian macroeconomic theory. Between the 1940s and mid-1970s, it was the leading framework of macroeconomic analysis. While it has been largely absent from macroeconomic research ever since, it is still the backbone of many introductory macroeconomics textbooks." - Wikipedia
            Or the presumption that inflation is caused by unions bidding-up labour costs, without reference to inflation caused by the Arab oil crisis in the 1970s. Looking at my annotated textbook, I'm surprised at my own patience to learn things so obviously untrue, next to annotations like "imports?", "the main determination of output is still labour market efficiency?" or "you can't buy-back a closed steel works with low wages", "real interest rates were negative in the 70s but investment low - rationed by the banks", "pseudo first principals", "getting silly", "silly", "pedantic", "bla bla", "probably not true", "doesn't follow", "impossible", "tax law: high investment but pension fund objectives allow takeover unless short-term profit cf. Ever Ready", "30 years out of date", "is this likely?". Fishman didn't choose this textbook - I did - but there was no space on his course to criticise theories either. Oddly enough liked Pete Seeger concerts according to a friend of his on the net who's pages is good to read. Eleanor Fishman - spouse - had something to do with the Almanac Singers who sang folk songs like this Pete Seeger one.
            What did you learn at school today, Dear little girl of mine? What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine?

            I learned that Washington never told a lie. I learned that soldiers seldom die. I learned that everybody's free, And that's what the teacher said to me.
            Chorus That's what I learned in school today, That's what I learned in school.

            What did you learn in school today, Dear little child of mine? What did you learn in school today, Dear little child of mine?

            I learned that policemen are my friends. I learned that justice never ends. I learned that murderers die for their crimes Even if we make a mistake sometimes.


            I learned our Government must be strong; It's always right and never wrong; Our leaders are the finest men And we elect them again and again.

            I learned that war is not so bad; I learned about the great ones we have had; We fought in Germany and in France And someday I might get my chance.

            The last verse didn't have UK cover versions sold by Music for Pleasure in Goodbans of Chiswick and Woolworths, wher cover versions of other Pete Singer songs were for sale. They were shown as interludes on programs like Blue Peter. They notably lacked criticism of corrupt feckless undemocratic unions that don't provide a lawyer when you get the sack, but that's where the world of song lyrics departs from the world of tables of data turned into economic reports; economists should be sharp, like forensic accountants, and if I had known about that career path I might have taken it & done good.

            My mum quite liked Nina and Fredrick records, usually covers of the tamer Pete Seger songs. I didn't really have social skills but had been befriended by someone who did American Studies [date of parents' business closure at Subdbury Carpets possibly 1985] and asked me about economics - or at least about Thorsten Veblen. He gave me a tape of another Vietnam song, about what happens if you don't fit-in at a US school and tick the right little boxes on the economics workbook. It is by Country Joe and the Fish. Like Pete Seeger, they liked to get the audience to sing along.

            Well, come on all of you, big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. Yeah, he's got himself in a terrible jam Way down yonder in Vietnam So put down your books and pick up a gun, Gonna have a whole lotta fun.

            And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam; And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee! we're all gonna die. Yeah, come on Wall Street, don't be slow, Why man, this is war a-go-go There's plenty good money to be made By supplying the Army with the tools of its trade, Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb, They drop it on the Viet Cong.

            And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam. And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain't no time to wonder why Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

            Well, come on generals, let's move fast; Your big chance has come at last. Now you can go out and get those reds 'Cause the only good commie is the one that's dead And you know that peace can only be won When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come. And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam;


            Come on mothers throughout the land, Pack your boys off to Vietnam. Come on fathers, and don't hesitate To send your sons off before it's too late. You can be the first ones in your block To have your boy come home in a box.

            Digression on the real life that I wanted to study

            There is a list of the kinds of things I wanted to study on the better economics teaching page, near the top. I would have liked to study a short course on why it is difficult to re-open a washing machine factory or a steel works. Ebac in Darlington have just started making washing machines. In the past they bought machine tools from the closed factory at Norfrost that made chest freezers. It was probably the same this time; some came-up for sale on an auction site but scale is a problem for most of us. They've solved it by building-up the business over generations, picking up a lot of skills, and buying-in some of the parts. They're also owned by some kind of trust that doesn't have to please shareholders. Slow growth of what works, buying used tools, buying-in parts, and working within cheap delivery cost of suppliers are all good ideas. One of the cutlery brands in Sheffield seems to have been based in block of workshops that all shared the biggest machines I think, although I can't remember the source - it was an archaeological dig before redevelopment. Small but expensive production methods for trials and top-ups are good, allowing larger orders to be sent. Even so, if it's 1984, it's hard to imagine any way to make a higher bid for the Servis washing machine business than a company that just wants the brand. This is what the housing developers wrote about Service washing machines:
            "The site totals 4.55 ha (11.24 acres) and is formed from two parcels of land; the first being the former Servis Site which is rectangular in shape; the second being the former Alucast Site which is an additional triangle of land, to the northern end of the site. The Servis Factory has now been cleared and levelled (2011) to slab"
            Supposing you still want to buy the tools, that leaves you without the brand because it has been sold to a rival, and probably most of the site because it has been sold to property developers. You need some way of interesting the washing machine buying public in your factory, by saying it employs people in their own economy, it pays taxes to their government, it finances the welfare state. You could to try exports, which are sold on reliability, price, and an exchange rate that gives overseas buyers a good deal. I would have liked to study the dire ignorance with which the national insurance system of the UK is managed, mainly because I want everyone else to study it as well; I don't want to live in a country where politicians come-in to office and think "why do we pay pensions?", because the subject is censored from the economics textbooks studied by anyone they talk to. Social insurance or Social security are good search terms. The subject also leads to the Social Clause - a brief 1970s idea in tariff policy - which say that an exporting country can have terms dictated by the importing country; get a welfare state or we charge you. This seems to be the only way of making the world a better place all-round, whether by reducing famine in africa or re-opening washing machine factories in the UK, but it is a taboo subject.
            Anyway that was about fact and this is a post about the fiction in the economics text book. As I catch sentences of the Levacic textbook I see endless references to some kind of fixed aggregate labour market that bids on price for work for itself in a closed economy, but only in the text book; obviously nothing remotely similar exists in practise. I did not realise at the time that the textbook theories are not much based on evidence. Professor Les Fishman at Keele taught text-book theory as childrens' TV explains the world of grown-ups. He had the same specs and haircut as Samuelson. Is that weird?

            3. Work Placements

            Did your course involve any work placements? No (skip this section) I did do a tour of an old ceramics factory, but I think the Quality Assurance Agency would call it a site visit rather than a work placement. So many factories closed so quickly in the 80s that they weren't well secured; it was possible just to walk-in and wonder round. I wondered round an old corner building with a 1950s front and a very old back where the last batch produced had been Steelite crockery - that's the nifty sort with cups that stack-up.

            One of the letters on the doormat was from a supplier complaining that a delivery had been refused; the factory closure had come as a surprise. I went through the post, just in case an order had come-in, but there was none. If an order had come-in after a keynsian re-flation, I didn't know how to make it up. I needed one of those invisible hands that's meant to guide workers around a capital stock of factors of production like training and work space and machinery for hire, but I couldn't find an invisible hand. Nor anything large and metal, because those things had had been removed from the factory for scrap, so I would have needed a lot of skill even if I knew more about ceramics, and there was no ceramics course at Keele. I just knew about the stupid system of using a pottery wheel.

            Digression on the price of steelite crockery

            I don't know a walk-in shop where you can buy cheap Steelite, new or secondhand, but I haven't much looked. I just found a place where you have to buy packs of say 36 per style and size and a minimum for free delivery (and ebay what you don't want) unless you buy other things from a catering supplier at the same time. Prices per mug before VAT are about what you'd pay in a shop after VAT, but anyone in catering might work-out how to get an initial batch second hand or just inherit them. The quality and continuity of supply would make more difference than price per piece to someone with a catering business. With fair economic management of the economy by government, and a consensus that it's good to buy things from democratic welfare states among buyers, the factory might have got another order, but it didn't. The sales web page doesn't say that it's made in the UK, so I guess it isn't, but the Price's National Teapot factory is still in business making Prices & Kensington teapots to sell at the same caterer's supplier on another page, so the extra cost of UK production (minus benefits like smaller batches and shorter lead times) wasn't the overwhelming single issue.
            If you google business support services in the UK, you just see free seminars in retaining intellectual property over china. Nothing about borrowing a ceramics press and kiln if you can't afford your own factory, or craft education for volunteers who want to be self-employed, and not much about shared marketing for UK makers. Three or four million people were unemployed, so work placements in firms that were still open would have made no sense while Professor Alan Walters, late of the LSE, and Sir Geoffrey Howe advised the Thatcher government how to close the rest down as quickly as possible. The only work under the control of Keele Economics Department was a survey of what happened to 120 redundant tyre workers, which would be about one per student. I suppose the assumption was that 20 of them would loose contact for reasons like dying or emigrating or writing colourful language one the question-form instead of ticking the boxes. I guess that if your mum or dad are one of the redundant Michelin tyre workers, it would be awkward to allocate you as a student to monitor their progress. Somehow Keele Economics Department got £30,000 of funding for this. Unfortunately the teachers counted these 120 people it themselves rather than making a work placement of it; none of the £30,000 reached students, or unemployed people, and the Economics and Social Research Council is too grand to keep a note of why they spent the money. If the course had made sense, and taught the weaknesses of models, we would have had a class about how hard it is to squat a ceramics factory and get production going on lower wages after the shock to the system that monetarists warn about, and there would have been some kind of survey done by students about why it's hard. I don't remember anything like that.

            5. Course Delivery

            There are various ways of [teaching to] to explore and analyse information and consider policy implications. [including] lectures, seminars, tutorials, workshops, peer teaching and learning, projects, experiments and distance-learning approaches. - Quality Assurance Agency benchmark
            Learning materials made available on my course have enhanced my learning.
            The range and balance of approaches to teaching has helped me to learn.
            The delivery of my course has been stimulating.
            My learning has benefited from [one] modules that are informed by current research.Practical activities on my course have helped me to learn.
            If you can't study numbers for economics, it makes sense to study pages of words written by the likes of Keynes before he wrote his general theory - "The relevance of the fact that Keynes’ General Theory was published in the midst of the Great Depression is hard to dispute. Understanding where theories came from, and why, will help students to make better judgements about interpreting and applying theory" - says the Post Crash Economics Society report. We did not study a word of Keynes, Marshall economist, nor any critical text, even though a member of staff had written one of them, called The British Economic Crisis, by Keith Smith. We might have read it in our civilian time or on his optional specialist thing in year 3 but it was not part of the main course. Our written learning materials were journal articles - like Samualson on the Public Good - or a textbook to use as background reading that wasn't related to the course; nobody said "this is the same as chapter 35 but I disagree with bits of it", or "revise from chapter 35". Another couple of staff were interested in input-output tables or African development, but had the typical Keele lecturers' career prospects and no chance to teach what they were interested in because Chi-squared and ISLM took-up all the space on the syllabus. There were very few MA students to supervise or help. It was like teaching A-level in a more mundane but robotic way.

            My learning has benefited from modules that are informed by current research
            An ability to discuss, analyse and evaluate government policy and to assess the performance of the UK and other economies and of the global economy. - Quality Assurance Agency Benchmark
            Professor Les was not just rude and bad at his job when he used the royal "we"; he lied. Economics teachers from nearly every university in the UK wrote to The Times about that time to state that new government economics policies were failing. Only one person from Keele signed the letter. I don't remember him teaching. As for Fishman, he once published an article in an obscure journal. Another in another issue, someone writes a long comparison of the Spanish Inquisition and the removal of communists and radicals like Fishman from US state employment in the 1950s (bottom of this page, gif image p.236) . Obviously, "their children will not join any organisations or sign any petitions". Outside college, people who did not deal in goods and imports and exports tended not to realise how important the exchange rate was to unemployment, and looked to economists to explain the problem. Economists just talked about the money supply - a 1980s fashion for naming guesstimates of money supply after motorways like M1 M2 M3 and M4 that soon lapsed - rather than admit that the government was lowering prices by closing factories and paying more than it needed to for public debt in order to encourage cheap imports from badly-run countries*. That's why I signed-up for an economics course. I guess that money supply figures are a bit like fairies: you can believe that tehy exist but it's hard to know if they really control anything. The Bank of England now explains the problem of how ceramics factories close when you put-up the interest rate with the bottom line of arrows on this diagram: a raised base rate, as in Geoffrey Howe's budgets, will raise the exchange rate by sucking-in large amounts of overseas investors to buy UK government stock or similar. This raises the price of sterling and goods produced by factories that use sterling to pay staff and suppliers, putting them out of business and loosing all their inherited tools and workshop space to the scrapyard and Bovis Homes; staff are dispersed and the chance of talented people getting together again in the kitchen of a Bovis home to make the next generation of ceramics are low. A fifth of UK manufacturing closed in the first five years of this policy, which continued in place and was later delegated to the Monetary Policy Committee, who used it until 2009 and keep it in reserve should inflation ever rise. It may well return. Decades later, that is the regret that shows in the faces of ex cabinet ministers interviewed about their awful boss. As James Prior put it "Once you've lost that much industry, it's very hard to get it back".**

            Bank of England report to MPs - taken from the pdf document on the bank of england web site
            the bottom line of arrows is what closes-down manufacturing
            [the diagram of how the official rate of interest effects the exchange rate and import prices shows better at a larger size. It is from The Transmission Mechanism of Monetary Policy, by The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, 27/4/1999 ,a report prepared by Bank of England staff under the guidance of the Monetary Policy Committee in response to suggestions by the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons and the House of Lords The text of the report states how the system works to smash the manufacturing economy]
            Students have exposure to the use of such techniques on actual economic, financial or social data - Quality Assurance Agency Benchmark
            We studied from a book called Begg, which had up-to-date footnotes to journal articles, and when keen we could look-up these articles in the library. These ought to be titled "please hire me" and are written by economics teachers who think "autism" has a different meaning in economics. Really. An article published on the Royal Economics Society web site says something similar in more polite language. A US survey finds them increasingly theoretical from 1962 until 1984, when professors of quantitative methods finally learnt to use their office computers. As a student I did find one article - in the Journal of Industrial Relations - that says that the elasticity of employment is quite flat; there aren't many more basic jobs at £5 an hour than £10 an hour as was discovered after raising the minimum wage. That's useful. It probably involved a bit of algebra which suddenly becomes interesting when shorthand for something you understand already but want to jot down or see on concentrated form, as a set of simple ratios. I expect there is some pleasure to be had in journal articles and algebra for their own sake, just as I quite like a bit of economic history or an episode of Top Gear and some people like cricket, but those are marmite tastes not to be inflicted on others without context and good reason. The Begg chapter on unemployment just discusses the technical problem of measuring unemployment. If the full text appears online it will be linked here. As for the main text - "The trouble with the textbooks in economics is that they contain things we economists know to be wrong." - Diane Coyle, professor of economics, University of Manchester. The book and the course showed no great interest in three or four million people unemployed and the death of so many manufacturing firms. The chapter on unemployment skips-over the problem; I suppose it's like a classic 1950s US textbook. This "British Edition" does try to be all things to all people; it has a bit on current affairs later-on. Begg Fischer and Dornbusch "Economics" seldom puts numbers next to graphs; it publishes graphs as diagrams to illustrate the grown-up's ideas to the children; a blue peter guide. Secondhand copies are good because they open at the interesting page. This opened at page 663-4 where it says that real exchange rates had made a massive change to competitiveness in the early 1980s, forcing a lot of factories to trade at a loss in hope of better times ahead. So it gets to the point eventually but doesn't put the main news on the cover where it belongs. I expect that if there's a Greek edition it mentions national debt on page 663, or a new British edition it mentions the banking crisis on the page 663. This mis-leading by textbooks is peculiar to economics. Alongside Begg, we had a book that described marginal cost theory without real examples, and the teachers had "workbooks" of multiple-choice exercises.

            The course is well organised and is running smoothly
            In year three, the course might have started, taking available data into account:

            Fishman took relevant factors into account before deciding what to teach in year three.
            surveys of what courses students wanted to study: none
            courses he was prepared to teach: none; the only course notes on his shelf were old revision notes.
            He cancelled any pretence at a 1980s UK university-style course for his part of year three teaching, holding his own 1950s-style "revision class" instead.

            Fishman writings show that he was slightly interested in transport, in the Vietnam war, and he'd tried to run a course in things like negotiation skills and different types of trades unions in the 1950s, but there is not much evidence of him ever running a course, even in the subject of unemployment and redundant tyre workers where he'd got large government grants to compile reports. He was slightly interested in market structure and how one number of firms in a market produced differently to another, but I don't think he ever got an ideas together enough to get something published or prepare a course. I think he was too slow and goofy to talk to a group of 12 or 24 students round a table, but his own excuse was different, and he was the boss. In the 1960s he'd told a visitor to Colorado University that the students could not "absorb a text book" and had "to some extent to be spoon-fed". It's odd to think that he used the same excuse at Keele in 1987 during an economic crisis, but he did. I remember the teacher in the one non-cancelled course, Kieth Smith, asking something like: "do you mind being taught like this? Because the person who runs this department - Fishman - is in favour of tutorials as long as people are OK with them and want them?"  The conversation had happened years before; it was over. Students are thanked for tutorial contributions in the preface to Keith Smith's book, so any hope that Fishman would finally do his job in the last years before retirement were low.

            Teaching based on available data

            Based on available data, Fishman cancelled one of two third-year specialised courses and taught something he called a "revision class" instead, standing at one end of a room and reading out to photocopied sets of economic exercises that he had found on his shelf from way-back. I didn't see anyone making a fuss; I got the impression that this was quite normal and that he did it every year.

            A good revision class would have been based closely on the book, chapter-by-chapter, topic by topic, to add a sense of structure. It did not. I remember people trying to get Fishman to say what was on the syllabus, and he not quite understanding the questions, as though we all had the same late 20th century mid-atlantic textbook in our heads. We did not. We had Laidler and Begg. Fishman knew this in a way - "take it home for revision", he said; "it is a christmasey book", but he didn't realise that the Keynes-influenced ISLM diagrams were explained one way in lectures, briefly another way in Begg, and a then compared to the current monetarist fashions that were rather opposite in the next bit of Begg.

            The teaching and testing style did not allow for points of view. We were expected to learn from the textbook as precisely as if we were rehearsing a crime alabi, but the textbook didn't agree with the teaching, so we were stuffed.

            Meanwhile the lectures were interesting, the classes were theoretical and often based on some kind of 1970s textbook like Samuelson, while students were asked to buy a 1980s textbook called Begg which said why the 1970s one was untrue. We learned an un-true model of how government can manage demand in an economy called an ISLM model. Our textbook gave it a few pages (549-557) explained in a slightly different way and then said why it was silly. I think we were meant to learn the first textbook, which we didn't have, rather than the second one and that our essays would have been marked wrong if we'd used the second.


            To get an idea of how revision classes were taught, search for "microeconomics recitation", and multiple choice tests. You'll find sheets of little questions and multiple choice answers. The subjects were the same X-shaped diagrams that students had studied in the first year of A-level, and the first year of the university course.
            One of the lines on the graph moves. Is the new price186? ? Whatever it says on the damn graph? An incompetent economics professor reaches the second last year of their career. Do theyDo their job as normal? ? Do their job as badly as possible in hope of early retirement? A new economic policy leads to 20,000 redundancies a week in manufacturing during 1979-80. Does the economics professor ? Say "now we believe in monetarist solutions"? apply economic reasoning to policy issues in a critical way? A university department repeats A-level teaching, then adds a little-bit more on the end. Does the student: apply economic reasoning to policy issues in a critical way, waking-up at exactly the right moment to hear a new detail ? "it is now accepted wisdom that those with A level Economics do less well in Economics degree results than those without A level " Economists sometimes talk about market failures. Have they heard of ? few sellers, lots of buyers? (Oligopoly, Monopoly)few buyers, lots of sellers? (Tesco & Sainsburys, farmers)sellers with only one job, scared if changing too often, and buyers with enough staff to allow staff turnover daily? (most employees and most employers)sellers of common work skills, competing with many others for jobs, including garment workers in Bangladesh or ceramics workers in China?pundits with a government grant to say that this is a good thing? Oddly enough, the textbook we didn't read does mention something called "Monopsony" in passing, just to say that it isn't going to mention it. I forget the definition.
            I didn't realise that it was possible to run a college course without discussion tutorials. That's what other arts and social science departments did. Somehow, it happened and something similar probably happened on the courses that our current politicians went on.

            The delivery of my course has been stimulating
            There was nothing very stimulating about the multiple choice examples. I remember waking-up during one about broiler chickens because Fishman did an unusual thing.

            At 5pm he would interrupt himself half-way through a sentence as a joke about how boring this was. It was funny: I'd like to do the same. But the memory seems odd, as though I must have got something wrong. Why would anyone teach micro-economics without a real-life example? There were plenty of economic statistics to interest students in 1987.

            My memory is clear and backed-up by other sources: a series of books called "economics workbook" by Peter Smith and David Begg exist in a tradition that writes boring multiple-choice questions about broiler chickens. Fishman could probably have found revision tests written specially for our recommended book - Laidler's Microeconomics - but to save copyright he used some old notes with examples from the Food and Drug Administration of 1950s america.

            There is also sets of lecture notes for teachers to lecture from if they want. They can be bought alongside textbooks like Saumuelson or Begg. I don't know if Fishman used them, but I remember him saying "we have to teach this stuff in order to call this an economics course" part-way through a lecture. Nowadays you can log-on to the McGraw Hill Publications web site and pay an extra £10 on top of the price of a book but maybe save the £9000 cost of hiring a teacher download the notes and read them out to you. Or you could sit in an empty lecture hall an get a machine to read them out for you, maybe charging other people to sit round you if willing to pay. I'm sure there are puppets that look a bit like fishman. You could mime to the sound track with a puppet.

            A digression about economics textbooks:

            I have forgotten what I was going to say. Anyway, I am reading Begg's 1984 edition and find it a well-written, well-produced book for someone who knows what to make of it. The chapter on "risk" that ends with the stock market is worth passing-around to anyone interested. The next chapter, "welfare economics", says more about the things it is not allowed to say than anything interesting in the bits left-over. It looks as though the first college divided all the interesting ideas up between the departments, and the economics rep got to the meeting late and had to make-do with what was left-over. I am reading a lot of this for the first time and have not got to the end so shall move-on to another box.

            A digression about economics textbooks: this is the neat, pretend-technocratic, pretend-neutral book that came out in 1948 in the US

            Keynes edited the Cambridge Economic Handbook series of textbooks, which petered-out in the early 1970s and a clue to the reason is that they are hard to track down; they didn't sell in America. In Canada and the US, "The elements of economics - an introduction to the theory of price and employment" by Lorie Tarshis didn't sell much either: it was deliberately boycotted in a campaign by college donors. The first textbook to sell in large numbers had to look neutral and technocratic. This is when a generation economists known for their bow ties and acerbic wit, rather than their ability to talk to students, began writing journal articles like the their narrow notion of a "public good", and the same writer wrote this neat technical-looking textbook. PART ONE: BASIC ECONOMIC CONCEPT AND NATIONAL INCOME Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 3 For Whom the Bell Tolls; Poverty Midst Plenty; Economic Description and Analysis; Economic Policy; Common Sense and Nonsense; Theory versus Practice; The Whole and the Part; Through the Looking Glass. Chapter 2. CENTRAL PROBLEMS OF EVERY ECONOMIC SOCIETY. 12 A. Problems of Economic Organization 12 Boundaries and Limits to Economics; The Law of Scarcity. B. The Technological Chokes Open to Any Society 17 The Production-possibility or Transformation Curve: Increasing Costs; Economies of Mass Production: Decreasing Costs; The Famous Law of Diminishing Returns. C. The Underlying Population Basis of Any Economy: Past and Future Population Trends 24 The Malthus Theory of Population; America and Europe Face Depopulation; The Net Reproduction Rate. Summery 31 Chapter 3. FUNCTIONING OF A "MIXED" CAPITALISTIC ENTERPRISE SYSTEM 34 A. How A Free-enterprise System Solves the Basic Economic Problems . . 35 Not Chaos but Economic Order; The Price System; Imperfections of competition; Economic Role of Government. ix B. The Capitalistic Character of Modem Society Capital and Time; Fixed and Circulating Capital; Capital and Income; Interest and the Real Net Productivity of Capital; Capital and Private Property. C. Exchange, Division of Labor, and Money Barter versus the Use of Money; Commodity Money, Paper Money, and Bank Money; Price Ratios and Money Prices; Money as a Medium of Exchange or as a Unit of Account; Money and Time * Chapter 4. INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY INCOME 61 Distribution of Income in the United States; The Inequality of Income; The Decline of Poverty; War Prosperity and Incomes; The So-called "Class Struggle"; Income from Work and from Property; The Render Class in a Decade of Falling Interest Rates; Incomes of Farmers; Wage Incomes from Work; The Position of Minorities. Summary 84 Chapter 5. INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY INCOME: EARNINGS IN DIFFERENT OCCUPATIONS 86 The Labor Market's Basement; The Unskilled and Semiskilled Workers; The Skilled Craftsmen; The White-collar Class; Professional Incomes; Is College Worth While?; Economic Stratification and Opportunity. Summary 107 Chapter 6. BUSINESS ORGANIZATION AND INCOME 108 A. The Forms of Business Organization 108 The Population of Business Enterprises; Big, Small, and Infinitesimal Business; The Single Proprietorship; Business Growth and the Need for Short-term Capital; The Partnership; Causes of Business Growth; New Needs and Sources of Capital; Disadvantages of the Partnership Form. B. The Modern Corporation 118 Advantages and Disadvantages of the Corporate Form; How a Corporation Can Raise Capital; Bonds; Common Stocks; Preferred Stocks; Advantages of Different Securities; The Giant Corporation; The Evil of Monopoly; Divorce of Ownership and Control in the Large Corporation; Amplification of Control by the Pyramiding of Holding Companies; Leadership and Control of the Large Corporation; The Curse of Bigness? Summary 132 Appendix to Chapter 6: Elements of Accounting 134 The Balance Sheet; The Statement of Profit and Loss; Depreciation; The Relation between the Income Statement and the Balance Sheet; Earnings, Dividends, and Purchasing Power; Summary of Elementary Accounting Relations; Reserves, Funds, and Intangible Assets; Intangible Assets; Good Will and Monopoly Power. Summary to Appendix 149 Chapter 7. THE ECONOMIC ROLF. OF GOVERNMENT: EXPENDITURE, REGULATION, AND FINANCE I50 The Growth of Government Expenditure; The Growth of Government Controls and Regulation; Federal, Local, and State Functions; Federal Expenditure; Efficiency and Waste in Government; Socialism and the New Deal; Government Transfer Expenditures; Three 'Ways to Finance Expenditure; Financing Government Expenditure by New Money; Financing Deficits by Loan Finance or Borrowing; War Finance; Fiscal Policy during Boom and Depression. Summary 166 Chapter 8. THE ECONOMIC ROLE OF GOVERNMENT: FEDERAL TAXATION AND LOCAL FINANCE 168 Federal Taxation; Sales and Excise Taxes; Social Security, Payroll, and Employment Taxes; Corporation Income Taxes; The Progressive Income Tax; State and Federal Expenditures; State and Local Taxes; Property Tax; Highway User Taxes; Sales Taxes; Payroll and Business Taxes; Personal Income and Inheritance Taxes; Borrowing and Debt Repayment; Coordinating Different Levels of Government. Summary 184 Chapter 9. LABOR ORGANIZATION AND PROBLEMS 185 History of the American Labor Movement; Craft versus Industrial Unions; Structure of the Labor Movement; Case Study of an AFL Carpenter; Case Study of 2 CIO Industrial Unionist; Case Study of a Labor Lawyer; The Case of the Philanthropic Capitalist; A Congressman's View of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947; An Expert Looks at the Labor Problem. Summary 199 Chapter 10. PERSONAL FINANCE AND SOCIAL SECURITY . . . 201 Budgetary Expenditure Patterns; Regional Differences in Cost of Living; Family Differences in the Cost of Living; The Backward Art of Spending Money; Income Patterns of Saving and Consumption; Graphical Depiction of the Propensity to Consume and to Save; The Wartime Accumulation of Saving; How People Borrow Money; Government Bonds as a Form of Saving; Investing in Securities; Economics of Home Ownership; Buying Life Insurance; Term Insurance; Straight Life Insurance; Limited Payment Insurance; Endowment Plan; Social Security and Health; Growth of Social Security. Summary 223 Chapter 11. NATIONAL INCOME 225 Two Views: Money Income or Money Output; First View of National Income: Cost and Earnings of Factors of Production; Transfer Payments; Real versus Money Income; Second View of National Income as Net National Product: Final Goods versus Double Counting of Intermediate Goods; Two Problems Introduced by Government; Capital Formation; Gross versus Net Investment; International Aspects of Income; Quantitative Recapitulation of National Income and Product Summary 243 PART TWO: DETERMINATION OF NATIONAL INCOME AND ITS FLUCTUATIONS Chapter 12. SAVING AND INVESTMENT 253 A. The Theory of Income Determination 253 The Cleavage between Saving and Investment; The Variability of Investment; The Community's Propensity to Consume and to Save Schedules; How In-come is Determined at Level Where Saving and Investment Schedules Inter-sect; Income Determination by Consumption and Investment; Arithmetical Demonstration of Income Determination. A Third Restatement; The Theory of Income Determination Restated. 8. Applications and Limitations of Income Analysis 265 The "Multiplier"; A Digression on the Identity between Measurable Saving and Measurable Investment; Induced Investment and the Paradox of Thrift; Deflationary and Inflatory Gaps; Taxation and Government Expenditure in Income Analysis; Qualifications to Saving and Investment Analysis. Summary 277 Chapter 13. PRICES, MONEY, AND INTEREST RATES 280 A. Prices Inflation, Deflation, and Redistribution of Income between Economic Classes; Effects of Changing Prices on Output and Employment; Galloping Inflation; Goals of Long-term Price Behavior. B. Money and Prices The Three Kinds of Money: Small Coins, Paper Currency, and Bank De-posits; Why Checking Deposits Are Considered to Be Money; The Meaning of the Value of Money as the Reciprocal of the Price Level; How the limita-tion of the Quantity of Money Preserves Its Value and Affects the Price 1evel; The Quantity Theory of Money; Inadequacies of the Quantity Theory : Prices Not Proportional to Total Spending; Inadequacies of the Quantity Theory: Total Spending Not Proportional to the Stock of Money; Relation of Money and Spending to Saving, Investment, and Prices; Conclusion to Money and Prices. C. Money and Interest Rates Three Demands for Money; Transaction Demand for Money; Precautionary Motive; Investment Demand for Money; Money as a Temporary Form of Holding Wealth; Short-term Investments as Near Substitutes for Cash; Money as a Long-term Asset; Money and the Determination of Interest Rates; His-tory of the Capital Markets since 1932; Money and Interest Rate during and after World War II. Summary 306 Chapter 14. FUNDAMENTALS OF THE BANKING SYSTEM AND DEPOSIT CREATION 310 A. Nature and Functioning of the Modern Banking System The Present Status of Banking; Creation of the Federal Reserve System; Banking as a Business; How Banks Developed Out of Goldsmith Establish-ments; Modem Fractional Reserve B. The Creation of Bank Deposits Can Banks Really Create Money?; How Deposits Arc Crated; A "Monopoly Bank"; Simultaneous Expansion or Contraction by All Banks; Three Qualifications; Leakage into Hand-to-hand Circulation; Leakage into Bank Vault Cash; Possible Excess Reserves. Summary 333 Chapter 15. FEDERAL RESERVE AND CENTRAL BANK MONETARY POLICY 337 Controlling the Business Cycle by Controlling the Quantity of Money; Brief Preview of How the Reserve Banks Can Affect the Supply of Money; The Federal Reserve Banks' Balance Sheet; Gold Certificates; "Reserve Bank Credit"; Federal Reserve "Open-market" Operations; Loan and Rediscount Policy; Changing Reserve Requirements as a Weapon of Monetary Control; The Problem of "Excess Reserves"; Summary of Reserve Banks' Control over Money; The Pyramid of Credit; War Finance and the Banks; The Inadequacies of Monetary Control of the Business Cycle; Public Debt Management and Monetary Control. Summary 355 B. The Public Debt and Postwar Fiscal Policy 424 Retiring Nonbank Debt; Retiring Bank Debt; The Debt and the Propensity to Consume; Debt Retirement and Interest; The Public Debt and Its Limita-tions; External versus Internal Debt; Borrowing and Shining Economic Bur-dens through Tune; "We All Owe It to Ourselves"; Debt Management and Monetary Policy; The True Indirect Burden of Interest Charges; The Quantitative Problem of the Debt; Useful versus Wasteful Fiscal Policy; A Fundamental Difficulty with full Employment; The Employment Act of 1946 Summary 437 Appendix to Chapter IS: Four Quantitative Paths to Full Employment . 440 Model I: Private Enterprise, Full Employment; Model II: Deficit-spending Path to Full Employment; Model III: Tax-reduction Path to Full Employ-ment; Model IV: Balanced-budget Path to Full Employment. PART THREE: THE COMPOSITION AND PRICING OF NATIONAL OUTPUT Chapter 19. DETERMINATION OF PRICE BY SUPPLY AND DEMAND 447 A. Determination of Market Price 447 The Demand Schedule and the Demand Curve; Elastic and Inelastic Demands; The Supply Schedule; Equilibrium of Supply and Demand. B. Applications of Supply and Demand 457 Effects of Changes in Supply or Demand; A common Fallacy; Is the Law of Supply and Demand Immutable? Prices Fixed by Law. Summary 466 Appendix to Chapter 19: Questions and Problems on Supply and Demand 469 Case I : Constant Cost; Case 2: Increasing Costs and Diminishing Returns; Case 3: Completely Inelastic Supply and Economic Rent; Case 4: A Backward Rising Supply Curve; Case 5: A Possible Exception: Decreasing Cost; Case 6. Shifts in Supply. Chapter 20. THE THEORY OF CONSUMPTION AND DEMAND . . 477 Theory of Consumer's Choice; Price and Income Changes in Demand; Cross Relations of Demand; Response of Quantity to Own Price; A Fundamental Law of Diminishing Substitution; The Paradox of Value; Consumer's Surplus. Summary 485 Appendix to Chapter 20: Geometrical Analysis of Consumer Equilibrium 487 Chapter 21. COST AND THE EQUILIBRIUM OF THE FIRM UNDER PERFECT AND IMPERFECT COMPETITION 491 A. The Maximum Profit Equilibrium Position within the Firm 491 Monopolistic Competition; The Finn's Demand under Perfect and Monopolist Competition; Price, Quantity, and Total Revenue; Total and Marginal Costs; Fixed Costs; Variable Costs; Total Cost; Average Cost: Marginal Cost; Marginal Revenue and Price; Maximizing Profits; Graphical Depiction of Firm's Optimum Position. B. Applications of the Profit Maximizing Principles to Perfect Competition and Patterns of Monopolistic Competition Price and Supply under Perfect Competition; Decreasing Costs and the Break-down of Perfect Competition; Minimizing Losses and Deciding When to Shur Down; Firm and Industry; Price and Cost under Monopolistic Competi-tion; Illustrative Patterns of Price; Chronically Overcrowded Sick Industries; The Case of Few Sellers of Identical Products; Monopolies Maintained by Constant Research and Advertising; Publicly Regulated Monopolies. 503 Sumnury 516 Chapter 22. PRODUCTION EQUILIBRIUM OF THE FIRM AND THE PROBLEM OF DISTRIBUTION 518 A. Production Equilibrium of the Firm 519 Final Production Equilibrium: Direct Approach; The Indirect Approach to the Production Equilibrium; The "Production Function"; The Law of Di-minishing Returns Once Again; Combining Inputs Optimally in Order to Produce a Given Output; Final Production Equilibrium: indirect Approach. B. The Marginal Productivity Theory and the "Problem of Distribution" . . 526 Checkal Theories of Rent; The So-called "Marginal Productivity Theory of Distribution"; Can Trade-unions Raise Wages? Keeping Down the Total Number of Laborers; Pushing Up Money Wages in Particular Occupations. Summary 532 Appendix to Chapter 22: Graphical Depiction of Production Equilibrium 534 Chapter 23. INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND THE THEORY OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE 558 Diversity of Conditions between Regions or Countries: A Simple Case: Europe and America; America without Trade; Europe without Trade; The Opening Up of Trade; Exact Determination of the Final Price Ratio. Summary Appendix to Chapter 23. Some Qualifications to the Discussion of Comparative Advantage Many Commodities and Countries; Increasing Costs; International Commodity Movements as a Partial Substitute for Labor and Factor Movements; Decreasing Costs and International Trade; Differences in Tastes or Demand as a Reason for Trade; Transportation Costs. Chapter 24. THE ECONOMICS OF TARIFF PROTECTION AND FREE TRADE 559 Noneconomic Goals; Grossly Fallacious Arguments for Tariff; Keeping Money in the Country; A Tariff for Higher Money Wages; Tariffs for Special-interest Groups; Some Less Obvious Fallacies; A Tariff for Revenue; Tariffs and the Home Market; Competition from Chap Foreign Labor; A Tariff for Retaliation; The "Scientific" Tariff; Arguments for Protection under Dynamic Conditions; Tariffs and Unemployment; Tariffs for "Infant Industries"; The "Young Economy" Argument. Summary 569 Chapter 25. THE DYNAMICS OF SPECULATION AND RISK 570 Speculation and Price Behavior over Time; The Great Stock-market Crash; Gambling and Diminishing Utility; Economics of Insurance; What Can be in-sured?; Joint Public and Private Responsibilities. Summary 582 Chapter 26. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND ECONOMIC WELFARE. 584 A. Fascism, Communism, and Socialism 584 The Crisis-of Capitalism; A Bouquet of Isms; Fascism; Marxian Communism and Soviet Russia; Socialism; Political Freedom and Economic Control. B. The Use of An Over-all Pricing System under Socialism and Capitalism . 590 Review of Free Competitive Pricing; The Concept of General Equilibrium; Pricing in a Socialist State: Consumption Goods Prices; The Distribution of In-come; Pricing of Nonhuman Productive Resources; The Example of Land Rent; The Role of the Interest Rate in a Socialist State; Wage Rates and Incentive Pricing; Su ry of Socialist Pricing; Welfare Economics in a Free-enterprise Economy. Summary 603 Chapter 27. EPILOGUE 606 Index 609 SUGGESTED OUTLINE FOR A ONE-SEMESTER COURSE Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION Chapter 2. THE CENTRAL PROBLEMS OF EVERY ECONOMIC SOCIETY A. Problems of Economic Organization B. The Technological Choices Open to Any Society C. The Underlying Population Basis of Any Economy: Past and Future Population Trends Chapter 3. FUNCTIONING OF A "MIXED" CAPITALISTIC ENTERPRISE SYSTEM A. How a Free Enterprise System Solves the Basic Economic Problems B. The Capitalistic Character of Modern Society C. Exchange, Division of Labor, and Money Chapter 4. INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY INCOME Chapter 5. INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY INCOME, CONTINUED: EARNINGS IN DIFFERENT OCCUPATIONS Chapter 6. BUSINESS ORGANIZATION AND INCOME A. The Forms of Business Organization B. The Modern Corporation Appendix: Elements of Accounting: Chapter 19. DETERMINATION OF PRICE BY SUPPLY AND DEMAND A. Determination of Market Price B. Applications of Supply and Demand Chapter 21. COST AND EQUILIBRIUM OF THE FIRM UNDER PERFECT AND IMPERFECT COMPETITION A. The Maximum Profit Equilibrium Position within the Firm B. Applications of the Profit Maximizing Principles to Perfect Competition and Patterns of Monopolistic Competition. Chapter 7. THE ECONOMIC ROLE OF GOVERNMENT: EXPENDITURE, REGULATION, AND FINANCE Chapter 8. THE ECONOMIC ROLE OF GOVERNMENT, CONTINUED: FEDERAL TAXATION AND LOCAL FINANCE Chapter 9. LABOR ORGANIZATION AND PROBLEMS Chapter 10. PERSONAL FINANCE AND SOCIAL SECURITY Chapter 11. NATIONAL INCOME Chapter 12. SAVING AND INVESTMENT A. The Theory of Income Determination B. Applications and Limitations of Income Analysis Chapter 13. PRICES, MONEY, AND INTEREST RATES A. Prices B. Money and Prices C. Money and Interest Rates Chapter 14. FUNDAMENTALS OF THE BANKING SYSTEM AND DEPOSIT CREATION A. Nature and Functioning of the Modern Banking System B. The Creation of Bank Deposits Chapter 15. FEDERAL RESERVE AND CENTRAL BANK MONETARY POLICY (OPTIONAL) Chapter 16. INTERNATIONAL FINANCE AND DOMESTIC EMPLOYMENT A. International Trade and Capital Movements B. Postwar International Trade and Full Employment Chapter 18. FISCAL POLICY AND FULL EMPLOYMENT WITHOUT IN FLATION A. Short-run and Long-run Fiscal Policy B. The Public Debt and Postwar Fiscal Policy.

            6. Feedback from Students

            I have had adequate opportunities to provide feedback on all elements of my course.
              My feedback on the course is listened to and valued. It is clear to me how students comments on the course have been acted upon.

            Higher education providers take deliberate steps to engage all students, individually and collectively, as partners in the assurance and enhancement of their educational experience. - Quality Assurance Agency Expectation
            This is frustrating because "listened to and valued" are such patronising phrases; "attempts to understand and agree or disagree" makes more sense.

            Just by chance I read that a student rep made a speech about the short economics course - it was called a subsidiary course - that people on other joint honours courses did. This was a rep for "Welfare", if I remember right. It was a speech in something called the Senate, which existed apparently. I don't know that at the time and didn't take part in any survey or discussion.

            There was no formal feedback system of any kind that I remember - only informal. And informal contact between staff and students was not encouraged on the core course. I conclude that I was not on some weird psychology experiment: "the control group of students were taught random nonsense, and their feedback was compared to students from the real economics course before different feedback scores were obtained". That didn't happen. If that had been true, there would have been a system of feedback from students.

            The only formal feedback request came some time in the 2000s as some kind of fund-raising phone call to graduates. I'm not sure how Keele got my number - I must be on linkedin or something. The voice asked if I wanted to subscribe to Keele graduates magazine. No, it's OK if I don't want the magazine or to make a donation, said the voice; that was fine. Had done anything to put in the magazine? What subjects did I do? What did I think of them? There were plenty of other attempts to get feedback from students that started in the 20-tens. I have not read a Quality Assurance Commission report giving Keele a thumbs-up in 2004, subject to reforms of the time continuing, but I suppose it says that systems for checking course quality were set-up and auditable by the 20-tens.

            I don't know what other people said, or the sequence of events, but Keele's vice chancellor decided to close the German department in 2004, and that she wasn't fit to manage an Economics or a Philosphy department in about 2008, that no more students should be recruited, and staff made redundant. The system was that if Keele's hierachy are unfit to manage an economics department, they should keep their jobs and the teaching staff should mostly be redundant; that's how the world works.

            Also about that time, Fishman Senior died in 2008 and Fishman junior must have been diagnosed with cancer because she died in December 2009. She wasn't easily discouraged from going to meetings or proposing things - in fact that's probably how she got cancer after too many fags behind the bike sheds after annoying meetings. She had even persuaded one of the British Communist Parties that wokers' control and Clause 4 meant a John Lewis style ownership of more individual firms by staff, which is a good idea. Some time about 2008, she did some rather sweet and brave things. She wrote obituaries of her father, who she seems to have believed was a great man, and sent them to the big newspapers. That's not usually how it happens. Surprised at his memorable story, some of them published, and the assumption that a great man had done his job as an economics professor was implied. And she endowed a thousand-a-year scholarship to Keele economics students in his memory, which must have cost £10-£20,000 out of her will. The terms of the scholarship show what a terrible sense of hierarchy the Fishmans had: it gives a thousand pounds to the local student with the best marks; the one who conforms best to what the teachers mark correct. It's enough to stop any local 18 year-old wanting to study economics at Keele.
            Congratulations go to Nathan Farrell, one of our Economics students, for being awarded the ‘Leslie and Eleanor Fishman bursary’ in memory of Professor Les Fishman who was Professor of Economics at Keele from 1969 to1987.The bursary is given to a first year student from the local area with the highest overall grade in Economics. Nathan is pictured here, happy to receive his cheque for £1,000 – Well Done Nathan!
            He looks more embarrassed than happy in the picture. If an employer wrote something like that , anyone would guess it to be the McDonalds University in North London, which is a catering college; the statement isn't proper university stuff and "grades" is an american word. There's another similar web page with another year's beneficiary, sitting in a posed group with banners each side to promote positive messages like "onward and upward", "forward to the future", "everything is better than average" - the sort of thing that a university PR department ought to discourage, but when times are hard people try anything.

            I suppose Fishman's reputation had already gone-around local schools, decades before the bursary, and that's why there was trouble recruiting local students. I expect local parents had said to students "why are we redundant and most of the factories closed?", and local Keele Economics students had said to their parents: "There's a man like Kermit the Frog who reads out exercise questions so we learn how to get marks - but he avoids talking about factory closures or says stupid things". If the college wants to recruit local 18-year-olds to study, then it ought to use his biography as a good historical exibit, which it is, and excuse for saying how much more university-like the teaching now is, and less McDonalds-like. An excuse to say what rather good things have been taught to Keele Economics students and what rather embarassing things have been taught because the system of short courses brings-out the worst in a teaching tradition if things go wrong.

            You will have gathered that the department still exists and it seems a pity that the group who did some of the best economics teaching had to take the blame for some of the worst, done during the 70s and 80s. It would have been better if there had been some kind of feedback system at the time. I remember giving one piece of feedback. It was in 1985, the year when Fort Dunlop's new owners ceased mass production because "imported cars come with the tyres already on". The second year drew to a close and something extra was taught on the end of the A-level syllabus. A-level in 1979 ended with the Phillips Curve along which post war governments had chosen how much growth to inject into the economy by creating extra demand. As this borrowed money circulated, it raised employment and as employment of people reached some comfortable low rate, there was more inflation. Employment was assumed to be employment of people; the capacity of an economy to produce wasn't much measured and at A-level we had to take it for granted. The course ended by saying that the curve was no longer true; the 70s oil crisis had led to stagnation and inflation at the same time. Demand management was no longer an option and economists had to start thinking about supply management instead. I suppose that 1970s textbooks ended by explaining demand management. The theories of extra income in a closed economy and a bit of money going for saving can be written as a curve called IS. A more nebulous, theoretical curve for "LM" or the money supply cuts accross it. The 1984 course textbook explained why this nebulous money theory could no longer be taught from a textbook and simply listed some different opinions, including a short quote given to a treasury select committee, so that readers could "follow the debate". It is an area where you'd expect some interaction with students and feeback about whether Thatcherite monetary policy was taught in a critical way. One teacher - Dr Johns - was allocated a class room with tables arranged like the cabinet room in Downing Street, as a big long double row. Just like other departments. I suppose he wasn't used to this because, unlike prime ministers, he sat down at one end of the cabinet table instead of the middle. That put him close enough for students to talk and I was the closest. He was teaching something like course 306 on this much-expanded syllabus that would be used a few years later. Outsiders would have called it a course in knowledge more than understanding, with an emphasis on knowing what the usual abbreviations were on textbook graphs rather than whether they related to the world outside the window. There was a graph called an AS AD model (in a closed economy), which is just the usual X-shaped diagram with "aggregate" written before demand and supply, and then a graph called an ISLM model (in a closed economy), Kieth Smith's, The British Economic Crisis, page 170 gives an explanation, with the second appearing to prove the first one a waste of very scarce time in order to make room for whatever was easy to teach as part of the routine, like stats or revision classes. Kieth Smith's book says "It is relatively simple, for example, to open up the model to include foreign trade and the balance of payments", but I'm still waiting to be taught that part. The other textbook we'd been asked to buy for revision - Begg - mentions the model between page 548 and 557 before going-on to say how different and nebulous the views of monetary policy are. Now this is odd, because the teacher was a graduate with an MA and teaching experience, who had given lectures about another debunkable theory on foreign trade. He taught at a time when every newspaper and news program covered the flood of imports that was closing UK manufacturing because of a high pound.
            Further, in the words of academic economist Michael Joffe, economists teach “theories now known to be untrue” (Joffe, 2011). These include:
            • the U-shaped cost curve
            • (and marginal pricing in general),
            • expected utility theory,
            • Real Business Cycle explanations of recessions.
            I asked him whether he needed to teach un-true models or whether we could get-on to the true models. The Keele versions of the "not particularly illuminating" quote were "underwhelming" and "nothing earth-shattering". He gave a reply that I didn't like about his choice of teaching method, which I suppose was the only choice he had, and needing to study the IS model and the ISLM model to get a full understanding. I still don't understand, though; a model of demand management needs supply to meet it. It needs a way of coping with imports from economies that follow different rules. I'm sure he didn't mean that his teaching method promoted understanding. A brief by the Bank of England for MPs is for enthusiasts only, written in dense two column text, but it helps MPs understand the transmission mechanism. Our textbook at the time was also written in dense two column text and had a bit of everything in it - there might have been a bit that tried to explain transmission mechanisms. This course was purely what inspectors would call knowledge or teachers call cramming or students call boring - it was a course about what shorthand to use on a standard graph and how to write the right answer in an exam. "attitude has been noted" Another teacher later informed me that my "attitude has been noted by all members of the department". The first one checked later that I had been told. Memory is hazy here. I would have remembered if the "noted" incident was linked to the "how are you getting on?" interview at the time; they were probably separate, so my interview was quite likely meant for someone else who's attitude had been noted. "All members of the department" is funny too. There is a corridor with loads of doors. You see some members of the department in big lectures and some in smaller events, but never the lot; most doors and names remain a mystery, so maybe I should remember an add-on like "all members of the department who have seen you in smaller groups but not talked to you and by the way that summons was for someone else". Further up the page is says that "I asked him". This was a private man to web references or academic writing, although one student co-wrote a history of Guernsey financial institutions with him and apparently the man got something published in NatWest Quarterly Review. I don't know if this teacher was on first name terms with his office door, but he was not willing to have his photo on the web site ten years later. I don't know why so shy, and how much this was connected to his speciality of development economics, which I give a theory about below. Anyway I must have struck-on something beyond a desire to keep a distance. Did staff realise early-on that they were going to cancel parts of the course? I guess they did, and had decided to string-out their textbook classes as long as possible as well, just to fill some kind of gap. Economics teachers are good at stringing-out the introduction until it's too late to realise that there's no point to the course at the end - you read about it in other peoples' accounts of other economics courses. Another odd thing about these classes on second-hand accounts of ISLM curves. I'm not sure which chapter of the textbook they came from, but the most likely one has a paragraph inserted and unrelated, right at the top of "monetary and fiscal policy in a closed economy", is a kind of SOS message that I would have been interested in.
            "Between June 1979 and December 1980", it says, "there was a sharp contraction of aggregate demand in the UK. In consequence, manufacturing output slumped by 16 percent. Believing that this slump would continue for some time, firms slashed purchases of raw materials and sacked workers in large numbers. And, on behalf of its member firms, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) sent a clear message to the government: get interest rates down in order to get the economy moving again". Then there is a complete change of style: "In this chapter we extend the simple model of income determination developed in chapters 20 and 21..."
            If a teacher had quoted that out of the textbook, I would have remembered it, but he did not. I suppose the ISLM curve means something a bit like the Bank of England flow diagram about monetary policy, but it's hard to make any sense of it without a context and facts so I never quite got the hang at the time. Since finding another textbook on my shelf, with revision notes, I see that I must have got the hang by the end of the course but I never thought it was a useful set of graphs or what I had come to study with years of my life and thousands of pounds of funding. If IS means income and savings, and the Cambridge Economics Handbook series that Keynes edited had a book called "supply and demand", it's a fair guess that he argued that UK peoples' combined income is about the same as UK demand, give or take savings. He lived in a time when the UK economy provided more of its own goods, with a lot of medium-sized manufacturing firms. There were a lot of people with money held in government stock for savings; it was the fashionable thing. I suppose he tried to put those two facts together. Keynes wrote a "General Theory" for other economists and edited the "Economics Handbook" series for people on short courses and the general public. In the UK economy, the general public do a lot of importing and exporting, so it matters whether a policy causes change demand in UK or Asia, but in the USA it might be easier to ignore imports and exports for the sake of a clear diagram. If you publish this ISLM diagram in the UK, you'd title the chapter "monetary and fiscal policy in a closed economy", as the Begg textbook does, but I don't remember this point being taught very much even though the Felixtowe container port and fiddled exchange rates had opened the UK market to imports more than ever before. I don't know what feedback had been valued and acted-upon in the past, but I know that something was brewing because a 1996 syllabus writes

            Econ 101, Introduction to Economic Theory

            • This is a compulsory course module providing an introduction to basic economics principles. The course takes three hours per week, consisting of two lectures per week, one for an introduction to Microeconomics, and the other to cover an introduction to Macroeconomics, plus an hour per week class to service the lecture streams. The aim is to introduce Economics in the analytical manner commonly adopted at University level. (Students should be aware that it is now accepted wisdom that those with A level Economics do less well in Economics degree results than those without A level Economics.)
            Clearly there has been student feedback and a decision reached to warn new students with a brave statement that this is more analytical. How was my algebra-junkie course analytical? Nerdy, yes; untrue, yes, analytical, no. Oh, on another subject, if you are the man overheard in a restaurant in Kew saying "all the stats show is that people are doing their job ... yes there is a long tail and some places are failing ... Blackburn", I didn't want to walk-up to your table and say anything.

            1. The burden of assessment is from college managers, who should survey less. National student survey questions are only asked to students about once by Ipsos Mori.
            2. The few failing colleges would be more if there wasn't a test.

            7. Physical Environment

            Security has been satisfactory when attending classes. My institution provides an appropriate environment in which to learn.

            A campus university is a dull, quiet place to contemplate, but computing was a problem.

            I've said that printed statistics were kept in an obscure departmental library, securely away from anyone who studied other subjects or most undergraduates. Computers were even better secured, locked away from students to prevent use. This is not an appropriate environment to learn from original sources. I am sure that a polite request to use the computers would get a helpful response, but I doubt it ever happened; the student would have to have Acorn computer stats software to hand and some stats to process with it.

            If computers had been meant for student use, and not for show, they would have been in the main library or the computer science department, open all evening with heating and security. Anyone visiting the department would have seen it set-up for small lectures and not university-standard teaching, so I suppose nobody visited except staff and students; the grandee who came-up from London between jobs at the Royal Opera House just phoned staff while they were teaching instead of visiting.

            There was also the problem of distractions.  A Kirmit-weatherman at the end of the room, trying to teach platitudes is not good if you want to study economics. The people on the course might have done better if left to themselves in the library. A third might have learned more; two thirds might have dropped-out and found happier lives.

            10. Assessment

            Teaching staff test what I have understood rather than what I have memorised.
            Assessment methods employed in my course require an in-depth understanding of the course content.The workbook example tests were marked by multiple choice which required some understanding of memorised technique. I think we marked our own sheets; the answers were on the back.

            There were essays. Some of the optional essay titles in the exam were broad, like a question about the effects of an ageing population, but these were not subjects much taught except in lectures. The essay titles that related to class-teaching, that I remember, asked closed questions, even if the title didn't suggest so at first-glance. So "What is a public good?" meant "What does a journal article written in the 1960s say about why lighthouses and roads deserve this special jargon term?" If you wrote the official answer to a closed question, and then added some extra ideas as wikipedia does, then the official answer was marked right and the others were simply marked wrong. You had to learn this from experience; nobody warned you. Not quite as bad as the Glasgow uni. essay which is given 100% if handed-in on time, but still a depressing experience to take part in. I don't remember any careful feedback at all; you just learnt from experience that wrote-learning of a particular view of the world was marked right and original ideas were marked wrong. I don't remember any feedback on essays, written or verbal. My memory may be unclear, but a department that maximises face-to-face time with students in classes is unlikely to have any staff time left-over for feedback; if they spent so many more hours face-to-face with students than my English department, then I doubt they could have had time to give careful feedback on essays. Come the exams, a few essay titles were slipped-in to the list that had open questions like "should we be worried about an ageing population?". I suppose they were there to look good to external examiners. I had a go at answering one or two but have no idea how they were marked because we didn't questions like that in the main course. Looking at recommended standards for awarding degrees, I'm surprised that most of us got one.

            11. Learning Community

            I feel part of a group of students committed to learning.
            I have been able to explore academic interests with other students.
            I have learnt to explore ideas confidently within my course
            I feel my suggestions & ideas are valued
            I feel part of an academic community in my college or university
            Some of the attributes that a graduate in economics possesses are generic... general intellectual skills such as literary and information-processing skills, as well as interpersonal skills... the ability to communicate technical analysis and results to various non economist audiences - Quality Assurance Agency

            A discussion or classroom session focusing on a particular topic or project. Seminars are defined as sessions that provide the opportunity for students to engage in discussion of a particular topic and/or to explore it in more detail than might be covered in a lecture - the extent of interaction will depend on the delivery method. A typical model would involve a guided, tutor-led discussion in a small group. However, the term also encompasses student or peer-led classes with a staff member or affiliate present.

            A meeting involving one-to-one or small group supervision, feedback or detailed discussion on a particular topic or project. Tutorials may be distinguished from seminars for the stronger emphasis that they place on the role of the tutor in giving direction or feedback. Tutorials can happen virtually as well as face-to-face. - Quality Assurance Agency
            I feel part of a group of students committed to learning.
            I didn't know anyone on the course; I don't know what they were there for and doubt that many of us was sure. We ended-up there.

            I wanted to study industrial design, which my school careers teacher thought was something to do with art colleges, so I went to St Martins College with my pot from Pottery, and discovered that they were an art college rather than a college for mass production. If I'd known how to get to a technical college, it would not have mattered that I flunked my A-levels because technical colleges were less choosy, but I didn't know. I fell-back on the system that everyone else from school tended to do, which was choosing a university place through the shared entrance system called UCAS, and even with flunked exam results I got an offer of Keele Foundation Year. "It was Keele Foundation Year or St Davids Lampeter", was a common thing to hear; Keele Foundation Year was the second last resort of people who wanted a university place. I suppose that the other people in the room were similar - that they had somehow ended-up like me on a course that they knew very little about before they turned-up.

            We faced forwards, not towards each other, and had no reason to speak. There was a friend of a friend who might say hullo, and someone who met-up for revision at the end. That was it. We looked looked a bit different to the English crowd. Less big hair; less long names. More like members of sports clubs.

            I have been able to explore academic interests with other students.

            Teaching before student feedback - external reviews of 1980s Keele

            In the 1980s I guess there was far less time spent on external reviews, fewer guidelines, and the process was probably a lot more hit-and-miss. Nowadays it's part of a system laid-out week by week, with checklists, verbosity from the Quality Assurance Agency and calls for things like strategic stakeholders and visions. It's not so bad if you dip-in to it at intervals and pick-out the lines that make sense. Once the sense is clear, colleges can try to find the simplest way to fit-in to the system.

            6.1 A programme of study in economics should be designed to encourage the acquisition of subject knowledge, understanding and skills with increasing critical facility and independence as the course progresses. To this end, learning should be organised and supported to foster active learning. A variety of approaches to managing the learning process may be adopted to achieve this, including lectures, seminars, tutorials, workshops, peer teaching and learning, project - based learning, experiments, games and technology - enabled learning . 6.2 These approaches to the learning process should be supported by appropriate resources including access to economic data bases, such as the Office of National Statistics data base, information technology based resources,and written materials. The use of such resources encourages active learning and the ability to select and make appropriate use of supporting evidence You may want to read this document if you are ... involved in the design, delivery and review of programmes of study in economics - Quality Assurance Agency Benchmark
            Keele University tell me they have thrown-out all records of external reviews of Keele economics teaching decades ago. Maybe the records self-ignited. Les Fishman certainly ceased working with students at age 64, but I don't know why. If anyone had asked me, as a student, whether the course should continue I would have said "close it - can we join a different college now please?", and then felt guilty and asked that the staff should come too, but I don't remember anybody asking me anything about the course. Something general about Keele survives from 1993. I guess that Keele's external reviews were not good, because I think the college had shrunk dramatically just before I joined. Managers tried to keep the buildings full; new students were forced to live in the halls of residence (not in the same year group - we were thrown-in where there was a space in single-sex bedsit blocks) and use vouchers to fund the canteens with their menu that included frozen cake. The college management used bureaucratic tricks to stop people transferring to other colleges: once you were sent-down, you had to serve your time. Years later I met a boy from Silverdale while cruising. That's a place a mile from Keele, full of the kinds of people it was set-up to teach. "What do you think of Keele?". "I prefer not to answer that question". I hope that people from Silverdale who are good at online stats programs get a chance to study economics at Keele in future. I also hope there are good options for exam-flunkers who fancy a subject-change like me: I got a good deal by switching to English and studying lots of subjects. I didn't realise that if I wanted to study one subject like Economics well, I could do better at a polytechnic up the road, live with my mum and dad in London and still get more life experience in gay cruising places than living on a campus in the midlands to learn about broiler chicken workbook examples from an overweight man in serious specs and tweed.

            Guessing Keele economics external review statements from staff behaviour

            I guess that external reviews mentioned the text-book nature of the course, because staff were keen to boast their choice of the latest textbooks, even if Fishman had not bothered to read the bits of Begg's "Economics, British Edition" that related to the UK and the crisis in which his students lived. In the last year we were asked to read it at home because "it is a christmasy book", which is a nice thing to say, although it wasn't good for revision: it has a more limited income-savings liquidity-money-supply (ISLM) diagram than the one we had to revise. The book came with some kind of standard set of lecture notes for professors, and a young teacher from Imperial College where the book's author worked was recruited to give a UK option for the one proper university style course that we could spend a few months studying. One teacher mentioned that "The Peculiarities of the British Economy" was used in the City (although we weren't required to read it); Fishman told a lecture that someone had found him a Nigerian economics text book - "quite a find" - although I don't remember ever seeing it. I suppose there were external examiners in the room where students were summoned for vivas after the end of our last year - maybe that's why the door only opened a foot. I did not know that Professor Fishman was retiring at age 64, and maybe he didn't either. Maybe the system of external checks by teachers from other colleges had finally caught-up with him, and they'd told him that they'd close the course if he didn't retire. Economics would have been easier if we had been allowed a copy of Samuelson's Economics, published in the USA in 1948, because it would have shown us what was still inside the head of our professor. References to the British economy were ignored in his teaching even if printed in the new Begg text book. The names of shorthand abbreviations on standard graphs were taught by wrote. I see that Samuelson's first 1948 edition has been re-printed so that the public can understand economists better. There is a wider world too. A generation had worse job prospects. I could easily leave for London and live with parents to face a year's job-search, volunteer work and attempts to learn some basic job skills before getting some temping shifts and and then a job for that social housing association that has the highest staff turnover and lowest wages. Students from the midlands had it much worse; I expect a lot emigrated. And the economics punditry trade still argues over Thatchernomics, mainly to approve in ignorance, like historians in the Newman and Badeal sketch "history today", and with the same lack of reference to stats or context or common sense. I remember the course as so bad that one memory prompts another.

            Unemployment in the text books - there is more here

            Economics textbook cover.
            Why Is Unemployment So High - from Begg Fischer and Dornbush, p 595, chapter 26, Unemployment

            By 1983 the UK unemployment rate was more than eight times as high as it was in 1965. The task for empirical economists it to try to say how much of this increase was caused by an increase in the natural rate of unemployment and how much was caused by deficient demand and sluggish wage adjustment.... [...] ....[usual telegraph-reader stuff]... [....] bla [it's very boring being deliberately mislead when you know it's happening and can't change the system. If this had been my English Lit part of the course I would have been allowed to write why I didn't trust the textbook. If it had been a data mining course, I could have written why I thought I could write a better summery of what I thought was happening based on data. But it was some wierd kind of in-between-everything course that just told me to learn the telegraph-reader opinions, which I did not trust, by heart and regrugitate them].

            The textbook I used in 1984 did not blame unemployment on the collapse of UK manufacturing, which is a little bit like talking about the 1930s recession and not mentioning the wall street crash or the gold standard. On the other hand it has a very clear section explaining why manufacturing collapsed, and another section in the micro-economics chaptors explaining how, if you have cut prices to retain exports as the pound rises, you are likely to run out of cash. The process is spelt-out step-by-step.

            There's a reference to Professor Peter Nichol at the London School of Economics, who says that the "natural rate" - which is people between jobs who are going to get one soon - is higher if the dole is higher. There's stuff about trades unions, which I skipped, and a couple of pages later something called "structural adjustment" of industries, particularly heavy engineering. That sounds like a euphemism for something the authors don't want to write. A bit like "industrial cleansing". There is a paragraph right at the beginning of the chapter on fiscal and monetary policy to say that demand for manufacturing had dropped 16% and the CBI had asked the government to drop the interest rate that was to blame. The Keele teacher who taught that chapter didn't mention it, but now I see it there. It's a surprise because the style of the book is to explain everything to everyone, including a 17 year-old on an A level course who has never thought about any of this before. After noticing these references to the collapse of UK manufacturing there is a section called "summery" which doesn't mention any effect on unemployment or long-term prospects for damaged manufacturing industries, but there are chapters about current affairs for keen students right at the end.
            The Pound in the 1970s - from Begg Fischer and Dornbush, p663, chapter 28, Open Economy Macroeconomics

            Figure 28-5 shows the behaviour of the nominal and real sterling exchange rate since 1973, the date at which most countries adopted floating exchange rates. We show the exchange rates not against a single currency such as the dollar, but against a basket of the currencies most important for the UK's international trading transactions. Effectively, the period can be divided into two. In the first half the nominal sterling exchange rate was falling steadily but the real exchange rate was not changing very much. Higher inflation in the UK than in the rest of the world was being offset by a depreciating exchange rate to maintain competitiveness essentially unaltered. During the second half of the period the UK's international competitiveness collapsed. The UK had higher inflation than the rest of the world and an appreciating exchange rate in the period 1978-91. In part, this collapse of competitiveness showed-up in a reduction of net exports. For example, UK imports increased by 11 percent in 1979. In part, however, UK firms responded to the collapse of competitiveness by cutting prices and making short-term losses, hoping that the competitiveness would improve again and the decision to remain in world markets would be vindicated. This, profits in manufacturing industry collapsed in 1980-91 when the real exchange rate was at its peak. Why did the real exchange rate increase so dramatically? We already have part of the answer. A tight monetary policy was introduced to fight inflation. Until domestic prices and wages adjusted, the squeeze in the domestic money supply meant that high interest rates and a sharp appreciation in the nominal exchange rate. Professors Marcus Miller and Willem Buiter have calculated that each 1 per cent reduction in the rate of UK money growth might be expected to lead initially to a loss of competitiveness of 2.3 percent.[9] Figure 28.5 suggests that the decline in UK competitiveness may not be entirely due to tight monetary policy and the problems of temporary adjustment. Although competitiveness has been improving since 1981, it remains well below its level in the mid-1970s. The real exchange rate is still very high. We conclude this chapter by examining the role of North Sea Oil. North Sea Oil

            By the late 1970s the UK was beginning to exploit the large reserves of oil that had been discovered in the North Sea. The doubling of oil prices in 1979-80 increased the importance of these reserves. What effect should we expect this to have on the exchange rate? [....] Thus, in figure 28-5 sterling's real exchange rate rose especially sharply in the period 1979-81 because there was simultaneously a move to tighter monetary policy and a sharp increase in the real value of the UK's oil reserves....

            The Begg textbook was thought a bit too complicated for Keele Economics teachers of microeconomics, I suppose. The chapters are there in the book, but we avoided them I see on the net that Laidler had serious specs, and his books might have had teachers' notes and exercises about broiler chickens to go with them, but the reviews only give one or two stars out of five. I conclude from this small survey that serious specs and teachers' notes have more effect on textbook sales than reviews by readers, but it is a provisional piece of research for which a grant would need to be obtained for further study to obtain a statistically significant sample of data.

            in Begg and used a more dry and theoretical microeconomics textbook called Laidler. Other work by David Laidler was about promoting the monetarist ideas that had just wrecked the UK economy. As students, we didn't just have to suffer the consequences; we had to pay a small author's royalty for each textbook to one of the culprits. In order to look grant-worthy we must use some jargon, and apparently the first person to draw graphs about consumer behaviour was called Mr Walrus. Maybe somebody was taking advantage of my nievity at age 20-odd, but the word "Walrasian" was worth a tick in the margin. The year after Fishman's retirement, one of his ex-colleagues from University of Boulder tried publishing "Microeconomics: theory with applications", so with less references to Mr and Mrs Walrus, and gets far better reviews from readers, but possibly the man didn't have serious specs and cheap teachers' notes to go with the book and that's why we didn't use his texts. There were other books in print about the UK economy, written for non-technical people. Just as there are books by Robert Peston in the bookshops now, there was one then by an Observer journalist called Britain Without Oil, and another by an academic called The British Economic Crisis. Oh and the academic was teaching in the same department, but we didn't use his book for the main course. There was some imagined un-written rule that an economics course was untrue theories of government spending and interest rates, over-theoretical theories of marginal cost pricing, hours and hours of statistics, and that was that. In the second year I chose my own text books from the shop on campus. McMillen published an economics dictionary and a more concise book for revision called "Macroeconomics: an introduction to Keynsian Neoclassical controversies". It's more concise but it's a nastier book than Begg; it quotes more and more obviously wrong theories without any balance or common sense. I spent some of the final year trying to learn these theories by heart, knowing that they were untrue, in order to pass an exam.

            Cow theory: sweatshop countries are called the "global south" and should milk the "global north" of welfare state countries for subsidy or their elites and help exploiting their poor in sweatshops that put people out of work in better-run countries.

            The current secretary of state for international development, Priti Patel, would have done the same lecture course like thousands of others on similar courses. I don't remember what I picked-up from Keele, New Internationalist, or Make Poverty History.

            The lecture course takes the standard ignorance of economists, which is to pretend they haven't heard of a welfare state, and then puzzles why countries without a welfare state are poor. Well, put like that, what do you think? The Department for International Development, with Priti Patel as minister, has just commisioned research into what reduces poverty, this spring 2017. My theory is that thes same secondary schools, pensions, healthcare, and social insurance wouuld work in Africa and India just as much as they work in the UK, and tariffs should encourage governments there to change, just as they should protect business that has extra costs because of systems like this in Europe. The EU tariff and the Multi-Fibre agreement are the kind of thing, or more subtle tariffs with social clauses.

            That's not what you hear in the lecture course, however much it tries to sound radical and socially concerned by a certain tone of voice. It isn't a history course. There is not detail about history. But if you say "colonialism" with a downward-note on the second "o", it sounds like a very bad thing, while if you say "globalisation" with an upward note on the first "o", it sounds more positive, even though the economic effects are much the same, and the history of politics in, say, Bangladesh between 1848 and 1948 isn't covered on the lecture course - just implied by tone of voice.

            Once the welfare state is ignored, there are some other simplifications. The exchange rate is simplified into something called "the terms of trade", and the difficulty of selling a commodity product like potatoes is simplified into that as well. So the same tone of voice says that you do not get many posh specialised goods for your potatoes. If development economists went to Irelant in 1848 and saw large families trying to survive on tiny fields of potatoes, they would have talked about the terms of trade - not the size of the families. If they dip-in to "Livestocks Long Shadow", to see what effect cattle farming has on the poor, I imagine they talk about the terms of trade again, whatever terms of trade mean.
            Cows come-in to the final simplification. There are countries called "The Global North", like Australia, which have a welfare state, and countries called "The Global South", which should milk the global north for every possible favour they can get with every possible excuse, and aid agancies that work with governments in the global south recycle the ideas that they are fed from those governments.

            So far, we have managed to sell textbooks in Bangladesh and Alabama without offending governments, but we haven't decided what needs to be done. In fact we have hidden the obvious, proven solutions to poverty, As a result, cow theorists are puzzled why a welfare state should want a slight tariff barrier against sweatshop goods, which are cheaper because their producers do not have to pay the taxes and national insurance that pay for schools and pensions and healthcare, and all the things that prevent over-population and poverty. This is rather unfair on the over-populated and poor who compete for scarce sweatshop jobs in badly-run countries, but a popular idea with the people who run these countries badly or run sweatshop in these countries. It's also a popular idea with the corporations that buy from these sweatshops, like Nike which has an office called Centre for Sustainable Fashion that they sponsor at University of the Arts, and so has a way fo getting its views known in academia.

            If you want to study further in a development studies course, cow theory doesn't say that people in the UK invented machines for making textiles, then put their own stalk-based fibre industry out of business to start spinning cotton instead of flax and hemp. It gives a different story, which was that system of government one or two hundred years ago gave these evil industrialists unfair access to cotton, allowing them the leasure to invent machines that might otherwise have been invented in India. Textiles are the usual example given, because the trade is very old - as old as industrialised ceramics - and so you can use some kind of marxist analysis to make it all look neat over a long period of time and that's your MA dissertation done. In the potteries, it should be obvious that clay did not come from China or India to make the pots; it continued to come from the UK just as flax and hemp had come from the UK, but that's evidence from outside the bus window, while the evidence in the long list of footnotes to the MA theory suggests something more convenient to the theory. I've learnt a bit about this since college, where there wasn't time to teach it, and found that it's often taught just as badly. The bunch I came across used material from Brooks Uni.

            • A textbook called "Rigged Rules and Double Standards" notices some problems among people in countries without a welfare state, such as Bangladesh.
            • The textbook blames the problems of countries without a welfare state on those countries that have a welfare state, for not giving more aid and buying more dumped sweatshop goods. It calls the countries with a welfare state "the north" and regards them as something like a giant cow be milked by the Mercedez-driving group of people in sweatshop countries who are called "the south". They provide sweatshop goods with their teeming cheap staff, so they do well; they get aid, so they do better, and they grumble that tariffs that protect any stable welfare state from sweatshop goods are unfair, in their view. The textbook leaves them no wiser.
            The book is published by a development agency, written by one of its staff, and used as a textbook on courses sponsored by the agency. The book reflects the opinions of governments where the agency does business, which are generally against providing a welfare state and in favour of asking for lower tariffs and more subsidy. The book is silent about other problems of poverty like the need to migrate, the tendency towards a population boom, the spread of anti-biotic resistant disease and social unrest. The book deliberately deceives as well. A quote that's apparently from another development economist turns-out to be from the trade minister of Vietnam. The person who wrote the book to order - Kevin Watkins - sometimes has work published by The Guardian as though a reliable source.


            Digression on international economics. Note to self: This subject in purple on the page three times. Consolidate or at least cut-and-paste together

            I was probably not a polite student; I wasn't big on social skills, and the economist who made sure by "attitude has been noted by all members of the department" was shy too. He didn't put his email address or picture on the web site. This begs a question of whether he taught something like vivisection that made him shy? The two strangest things I've heard economists say are that (1) Inflation is caused by steelworkers bidding-up wages, and if you close the steel works with cheap imports everything will be OK. This is untrue. (2) (a) Globalization was wicked pre-1948 (or whatever the date of independence of some country) and worked entirely in favour of workers in the colonising country like the UK. There ws no down side, like loss of the hemp and linen industry or cheap imports from colonies that had no national insurance system after the UK built one up from 1911. This is untrue. (b) Globalization is wonderful post-1948, and works in everyone's favour. If a country like Bangladesh still doesn't have a national insurance system in 2015, it's rude to say that because it's meddling in the internal affairs of another country; your attitude has been noted. If Bangladeshi imports therefore undercut the price of goods made in the UK, it's rude to say so; your attitude has been noted again. Even if the virtue of free trade at all costs, including national insurance, is untrue. I don't base this on anything I studied at Keele because there was only one optional option and I chose one about UK growth, but I've found the arguments as described put by people who work for development agencies. Oxfam published a book called "Rigged Rules and Double Standards" to put the point of view. This was also the special subject of the teacher I annoyed, so I suggest a theory. The more rediculous the theory put by an economist, the more touchy that economist will be. It applies to left-leaning ones like development economists, and right-leaning ones like monetarists. Even if they talk sense. the weight of textbook opinion will force them to reply to opposite opinions. By the way, the teacher I got is probably living in retirement now and if he reads this, I'm sorry if I was a bit rude and hope things go well. I googled that he co-wrote something about Guernsey financial services regulation with someone who was a student about that time. I don't know if it's a good piece of writing but it's proof that he didn't breath fire.

            Suggesting the un-knowable: development economics is touchy. Note to self: the three purple paragraphs are the same. Consolidate

            I can't be sure what was thought of the short, university-like courses that were held at the end of the third year, but I know that a new member of staff had been taken-on to teach UK development economics. Keele had a lot of overseas students; development economics of African and Asian countries would have been an option most years. I know from other experience that development economists are some of the ones you have doubts about as sane, balanced people. If they'd taught in 1984 that UK job losses were the inevitable result of post-colonial globalisation being so much better than colonial globalisation, and that it was not for us to wish a welfare state or a tariff on competing countries, nor talk about the effects of globalisation on the UK economy, I think someone might have thrown something at one of the teachers. But I can't say what courses were dropped or whether anyone threw anything, nor why the one of the development economics experts was particularly touchy and chose not to have his photo or contact details on the college web site even ten years later. Nor why staff tended to stand at the end of a room, at a distance from students, like prison warders

            Development Economics for a developed country: UK fashion and design - misfit paragraph

            Meanwhile London College of Fashion hosts offices that don't do any teaching at all, with funds raided from the Higher Education Funding Council, which means you, me, and missing services for our grannies. One such existed to encourage out-sourcing of UK designers' manufacturing to China. It was called Creative Connexions, with an office near photography languages and the students union, and another office in China. Somewhere in government departments, groups of people thought this was a good idea, probably using ideas they'd picked-up on economics courses. Another office called "centre for sustainable fashion" is sponsored by Nike and in turn sponsors an all party group in the House of Lords. And Ethical Fashion Forum, down the road, shared offices with Pantstopoverty who appear from their actions not to want a welfare state.

            Computer Science at Keele in the 1980s - misfit paragraph

            The Computer Science department ran short courses for students. A teacher would tried to explain how to join the beginning and the end of a half-page program written in Pascal. He was not able to do this. Students study; I did my best to learn in other ways, but at the time there was no complete-enough textbook for sale about Pascal, because hardly anyone ever uses it. There was no system for putting students in touch with each other for self-help, and no way of asking any paid-staff one-to-one. No drop-in system. No supervised practise. But at least there was access to a computer for that course, which there wasn't for economics. The other place to expect computers in a college would be the library. It had a suggestions book - page after page the same. "The clocks in the library tell the wrong time". Answer: "That is a subject for the maintenance department; library staff do not adjust the clocks". I expect it's the same now. At Hull, Phillip Larkin might have written a poem about the clock-setting suggestions book.

            Careers at Keele - misfit paragraph

            Keele service station does not allow you to enter the area by car, but you can leave. For staff it is the other way-around. A job teaching the core of a subject doesn't help your CV stand-out, even if you are good with a range of students and learn from them. awards Keele four stars for most things, but one star for prospects. For students it was the same: there was no way of transferring-away from this college to another one. Someone tried but the burocrats found a way to prevent it. The place was run like that. Invisible dragons made decrees on no particular authority about whether you needed to rent their rooms or use their furniture or buy vouchers for their canteens.

            Reason for quoting forgotten ministers when writing about the 1980s - misfit paragraph

            Alan Clark's quote about the unemployed on "tacky schemes to keep them off the register" is on page 94 of his book apparently. It's cheap to buy second hand, a lot is on google books, and googling the reference found me a page about unemployment figures that I haven't read but looks academic. I like quoting Thatcher's ministers about Thatcher because she's so divisive that their informed, conservative opinion doesn't put people off in a way that a quote from Arthur Scargill might do. I'm not sure where the quotes from other ministers are written though. Interviews were broadcast I think on the BBC in a documentary about the time of her funeral. James Prior, Francis Pym and Ian Gilmour show regrets. My impression was that some of them wanted to talk more about economic devastation - to be given a chance to apologise - but that the interviewer didn't let them. Sir Ian Gilmour looks sad about Thatcher's offer to resign on the failure of her verbal assault on other European prime ministers in Dublin. Francis Pym says something like "we should have explained that our proposed policies could not work in a recession". James Prior says something like "once you have lost that much manufacturing, it's very hard to get it back". Some of them state that William Whitelaw as the deputy who "put aside any moral obligation" to voters in deciding what to do in disputes between ministers and the prime minister and her advisers. If anyone has a link to this program I hope they can add it as a comment to this blog.

            Here is a quote from someone good at economics teaching who knew about Keele in the 1980s. Most of it was clearly much more of a course in statistics exercises and wrote-learning than the surviving 1990s syllabus which looks respectable.

            "...about Keele in the 1980s, it was designed to deliver rather dull teaching - the joint honours degree meant that each department was constrained to deliver just the core of the subject, since they only had about 6 hours per week of the students total time. The purpose of the design was to enable students to put together unusual combinations of subjects through their own choices, which was a good idea, but with a teaching downside. And then in the 1990s students increasingly opted for related subjects, making the original design redundant. The second year economics in the 1980s was three hours lectures, two hours on stats, and one class. The third year was similar, with one or two options in the final half of the year. Collaboration across departments in teaching and research was also hindered by the same structure. Incidentally, I am talking about "courses", not "modules" - modules were only introduced in the early 1990s, and contributed to a reduction in the amount of teaching done - as did semesterisation. So students today, by and large, get far less contact time than they did then. In Manchester, when they built the new faculty a few years ago, it was designed in such a way that students had no direct access to the staff offices - their swipe cards did not let them in."

            Untitled misfit paragraph for deletion

            Teachers were funded a bit like a police force, with a similar system of peer review, like the one that says Derbyshire Police Force has not been fit for purpose for decades. The difference is that it was easier to close one college department and open another in another subject at the same college, while it's hard to close-down a police force, so the peer review system was more important. Unfortunately it would be done by people from the field of economics, so if a subject is boring everywhere, the system continues. I understand without knowing my source that the college did contract a lot in the years just before 1984 - that it halved in size - so maybe even the peer review system singled Keele out for cuts in funding. As for the subject, I see that there are classification codes for what people write about in economic journals, and, looking at them, I can't see why people would want to study some of them except by mistake A second problem is that students might not apply. That doesn't and didn't matter too much either. Prospectuses were puzzling and little-read. If, somehow, word got-out that a course was so bad that nobody applied, then a clearing system would offer the places to students like myself who had flunked our exams and first few choices of course. There might be a spiral of decline at this point, with students dropping-out or studying badly, but at least we were ready on the chairs at the start of the course, and with sufficient drilling and revision might be coaxed-through to the end of it. Lastly there were overseas students, who were offered a very high list price. I don't know if there was a discount for block bookings. I remember one student from Nigeria, who did Politics, and a bunch from Cameroon. I don't remember any from Europe where grants for study are more generous; the growth market for UK educators was Africa and Asia; videos of Keele on sunny days were sent to Hong Kong. If you are a cartoon character of a professor, rather stagy, you might put-on a show of normality for the overseas students rather like the dinner party in Carry-On Up The Khyber. If a student asked why factories were closing, and you didn't care either way, you might just pretend they weren't closing and say "I don't know - maybe their design wasn't good enough" If something worried the teaching staff in the 1980s - made them so rude to students who questioned the system - then it would probably be the chance of a bad peer review or something else that made college managers decide to close the department and expand another one instead. The college states that it has thrown-out records of 1980s peer reviews, but the professor's decision to take a phone call from his boss during a seminar with students shows that he knows student feedback wasn't a problem, but the ability to sound to the boss was important. If not good, then cheap. Now the system has changed. Most of the money follows the student, at £9,000 a head from the Student Loans Company. Government publishes unistats reviews, and I hope applicants are good at using them to find an interesting economics course before the next economic crisis. There's also a chance for colleges to expand the number of places if they want, started recently, so that the supply of students through clearing will gradually dry-up for the few really bad courses. I've not checked my facts and might have got them wrong, but now you know my gut feeling about how the system works and where it might go now that the funding has changed.

            How this blog post comes-about - misfit paragraphs

            The blog began to keep track of a Drupal software installation, which never happened - hence to choice of a quick and dirty blogging platform and messy url. The blog continues on the excuse of trying to promote a shoe shop that sells vegan shoes, but mainly because I just write anyway, by default. The interest in Keele Economics, 30 years after study there, began when I tried to debunk an Oxford Economics report called The Value of Fashion, which I don't believe but which has a lot of technical bamboozlement about it. It struck me that I remember next to nothing about my economics degree, which isn't surprising because I had chosen to study economics in such a cut-down textbookey way, because computers at the college weren't yet good enough to help, and because of the terrible tradition of teaching economics which applies at most colleges I think, at least in the first year, from Oxford teaching PPE to future chancellors to the sensible-sounding ones like Glasgow or Manchester where there have been student protests, and to the odd ones like Keele or Open University. I had noticed an obituary and scholarship in memory of all who suffered bad teaching there, and, as memories like the Great Man taking a phone call in a seminar and standing to drill large classes in multiple choice exercises, I thought there was a story about the man himself. I asked a question on Quora which they kept deleting as I added more detail, very much as US colleges had deleted the man's job when they found out what party he belonged to. You don't get burned as a witch at the Berkley, California or the University of Boulder, Colorado - that's Salem - but you get the sack and end up working on the docks or doing the books for a relative with a furniture workshop. I hoped to discover that the man had some unusual set of beliefs. I only discovered that he liked to teach from Samuelson, which has been considered communist by some people in america. As I Googled and Binged and put work-in-progress here, I realised that this wasn't a story about a man teaching deliberately badly as a private joke, even if that was true. Loads of economics departments still teach this badly and their staff give each other peer reviews. So the story moved from an account of a 1980s economics course to the 21st century unistats which I discovered and played with, and sites like the Post Crash Economics Society which I had not known about before. That led to other posts about the worst degree courses, and current economics courses.

            The Leslie and Eleanor Fishman Bursary at Keele University

            "In brief: News from Keele, Wetley Rocks and Stoke-on-Trent By This is Staffordshire | Posted: October 10, 2008 KEELE: Hot topics like the credit crunch and the economics of the Iraq War will be coming under the microscope at a conference being held at Keele University next week. Distinguished economists from the UK and the U.S. will be speaking at the event on Wednesday at Keele's management centre. It has been organised in memory of Leslie Fishman, who was an economics professor at the university between 1969 and 1987. The conference will be followed by a reception, where a new Leslie and Eleanor Fishman bursary will be launched. It will be awarded annually to the best first year student from the Potteries. Read more:" This reads very much like a paragraph in the Cornell Daily Star fifty years earlier, promoting Fishman's grand lecture about Thorsten Veblen. Just like the Cornell Daily Star in the early 60s, the Sentinel doesn't send a reporter but publishes the invitation. Further research funding is required for reading the local paper, but at a first glance the Sentinel's catchment area is more troubled in 2008. Cornell Daily Star readers stared at adverts for horror movies and explicit pictures of underwear. Sentinel readers learn that someone from Wetley Rocks was convicted of sexual assaults and a 20-year-old admitted shoplifting £309-worth of stuff from Boots at Tunstall. These are separate stories that did not happen at the conference. During my English Literature degree I got an excuse to gut a book called The Nationwide Audience which shows how much many people hate this kind of patronising local news that dis-connects the broader issues that cause problems from some concept of local people and local readers about local issues. The Sentinel doesn't just make itself boring by failing to write a report on macroeconomics, it has a weird kind of patronising knowing incompetence. Why write "will be coming under the microscope", instead of "will come under the microscope"? While researching my awful economics professor I found an exception to the usual rule in local news. Anyway I meant to say what you have guessed: that there is some connection between what chancellors do with advice from voters and opinion polls and civil servants and economists, with some distant memory of a PPE course they took decades earlier, and what happens to the people in Stoke and Whetley Rocks who end-up doing bad things. Reports of student bursaries suggest that they are between £500 and £1,000 and awarded once each year to the best performing local economics student completing year one. The first student got £1,000. That sounds like a deal that would cost £10,000-£20,000 to a donor funding volunteer trustees to obtain 5-10% return. That's much less than six months salary for a professor who does no tutorials, ignores computers, and should not have been employed. Maybe the best thing it does is expose how much someone could think they did a good teaching job in the 1980s when the truth is that they didn't even begin to try to teach. I'd prefer the cash to be shared-out between all traceable graduates of the course in compensation, but don't know how that could be organised. The bursary will probably do a lot more good in exposing students to the limits of teaching and studying economics - specially to the future politicians studying another short economics course as part of PPE. what happened next This could be a good place to say what happened next in the office and to the next economics students at Keele. I've googled this subject so much that a story unfolded. The powers - whoever they were - chose someone with this CV as next chief: "Roger studied Mathematics at Cambridge University, followed by a PhD in Theoretical Physics in the Cavendish Laboratory. His first position was as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Decision Theory at the University of Manchester.". I guess the project was doomed from that moment, but university commitment to joint-honours degrees for everyone, and to contrasting short courses, wained. The next chief managed to force his students to do separate maths courses, leaving more time on the timetable. Management of the department was now shared with another, name to repell students as "management something or other", and dreamed up the idea of "modules", which give students and tutors a lot more choice but a lot less chance to get to know each other and teach or study in depth. With these tweaks to the system, it was possible to look more like a normal university on the syllabus. I only know this from web searches, but one ex-staff member ex-staff member - author of The Economy of the Word - has a niceley-written page about it on his web site. I understand that the same kind of thing happened at other UK universities. The maths person went-on to University of Manchester, where the Post Crash Economics Society set-up.

            Current National Student Survey questions, including optional follow-up questions and extra questions for NHS students

            Main Questionnaire

            Definitely agree Mostly agree Neither agree nor disagree Mostly disagree Definitely disagree Not applicable

            The teaching on my course

            1. Staff are good at explaining things. 2. Staff have made the subject interesting. 3. Staff are enthusiastic about what they are teaching. 4. The course is intellectually stimulating.

            Assessment and feedback

            5. The criteria used in marking have been clear in advance. 6. Assessment arrangements and marking have been fair. 7. Feedback on my work has been prompt. 8. I have received detailed comments on my work. 9. Feedback on my work has helped me clarify things I did not understand.

            Academic support

            10. I have received sufficient advice and support with my studies. 11. I have been able to contact staff when I needed to. 12. Good advice was available when I needed to make study choices.

            Organisation and management

            13. The timetable works efficiently as far as my activities are concerned. 14. Any changes in the course or teaching have been communicated effectively. 15. The course is well organised and is running smoothly.

            Learning resources

            16. The library resources and services are good enough for my needs. 17. I have been able to access general IT resources when I needed 18. I have been able to access specialised equipment, facilities, or rooms when I needed to.

            Personal development

            19. The course has helped me to present myself with confidence. 20. My communication skills have improved. 21. As a result of the course, I feel confident in tackling unfamiliar problems. 22. Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course. Looking back on the experience, are there any particularly positive or negative aspects you would like to highlight? (Please use the boxes below.)

            National Student Survey Bank of Questions (Optional)


            B1. Careers

            As a result of my course, I believe that I have improved my career prospects. Good advice is available for making career choices. Good advice is available on further study opportunities N/A

            B2. Course Content and Structure

            All of the compulsory modules are relevant to my course; There is an appropriate range of options to choose from on my course, The modules of my course form a coherent integrated whole

            B3. Work Placements

            Did your course involve any work placements? Yes (ask all questions in this section) No (skip this section) I received sufficient support and advice from my institution about the organisation of my placements; My placements were valuable in helping my learning, My placements have helped me to develop my skills in relation to my course, My placements have helped me to develop my general life skills, The taught part of my course was good preparation for my placements

            B4. Social Opportunities

            I have had plenty of opportunities to interact socially with other students; I am satisfied with the range of clubs and societies on offer, I am satisfied with the range of entertainment and social events on offer

            B5. Course Delivery

            Learning materials made available on my course have enhanced my learning; The range and balance of approaches to teaching has helped me to learn, The delivery of my course has been stimulating, My learning has benefited from modules that are informed by current research, Practical activities on my course have helped me to learn

            B6. Feedback from Students

            I have had adequate opportunities to provide feedback on all elements of my course. My feedback on the course is listened to and valued It is clear to me how students comments on the course have been acted upon

            B7. The Physical Environment


            B8. Welfare Resources and Facilities

            There is sufficient provision of welfare and student services to meet my needs. When needed, the information and advice offered by welfare and student services has been helpful

            B9. Workload

            The workload on my course is manageable. This course does not apply unnecessary pressure on me as a student. The volume of work on my course means I can always complete it to my satisfaction. I am generally given enough time to understand the things I have to learn

            B10. Assessment

            Teaching staff test what I have understood rather than what I have memorised. Assessment methods employed in my course require an in-depth understanding of the course content

            B11. Learning Community

            I feel part of a group of students committed to learning. I have been able to explore academic interests with other students. I have learnt to explore ideas confidently within my course. I feel my suggestions and ideas are valued. I feel part of an academic community in my college or university

            B12. Intellectual Motivation

            I have found the course motivating. The course has stimulated my interest in the field of study. The course has stimulated my enthusiasm for further learning

            National Student Survey Questions for NHS-Funded Students only


            N3 Practise placements

            I received sufficient preparatory information prior to my placement(s) I was allocated placement(s) suitable for my course I received appropriate supervision on placement(s) I was given opportunities to meet my required practise learning outcomes / competences My contribution during placement(s) as part of the clinical team was valued My practise supervisor(s) understood how my placement(s)related to the broader requirements of my course N/A

            Quality Assurance Agency Benchmarks for Economics Degree Courses

            Since finding the benchmark standards, which I suppose are for discussion by external examinors if they want, I've found expectations B3,4 and 5 and C that are relevant to students on courses. If there is any legal significance to a quango document with "expectation" written on it, I suppose it's mixed-up with the idea of buyers' reasonable expectations in law, but I don't think these are enforcable in something as vague as education and of course teachers have reasonable expectations of students that aren't mentioned. There are also "indicators" which look like confabulation on the theme of write documents and form committees; this must be quite annoying to people in the trade but it makes more sense to outsiders More detail on the quality code part B

            Expectation B1 (Programme design, development and approval)

            Higher education providers, in discharging their responsibilities for setting and maintaining academic standards and assuring and enhancing the quality of learning opportunities, operate effective processes for the design, development and approval of programmes.

            Expectation B2 (Recruitment, selection and admission)

            Recruitment, selection, and admission policies and procedures adhere to the principles of fair admission. They are transparent, reliable, valid, inclusive and underpinned by appropriate organisational structures and processes. They support higher education providers in the selection of students who are able to complete their programme.

            Expectation B3 (Learning and teaching)

            Higher education providers, working with their staff, students and other stakeholders, articulate and systematically review and enhance the provision of learning opportunities and teaching practises, so that every student is enabled to develop as an independent learner, study their chosen subject(s) in depth and enhance their capacity for analytical, critical and creative thinking.

            Expectation B4 (Enabling student development and achievement)

            Higher education providers have in place, monitor and evaluate arrangements and resources which enable students to develop their academic, personal and professional potential.

            Expectation B5 (Student engagement)


            Expectation B6 (Assessment and the recognition of prior learning)


            Expectation B7 (External examining)

            Higher education providers make scrupulous use of external examiners.

            Expectation B8 (Programme monitoring and review)

            Higher education providers, in discharging their responsibilities for setting and maintaining academic standards and assuring and enhancing the quality of learning opportunities, operate effective, regular and systematic processes for monitoring and for review of programmes.

            Expectation B9 (Academic appeals and student complaints)

            Higher education providers have procedures for handling academic appeals and student complaints about the quality of learning opportunities; these procedures are fair, accessible and timely, and enable enhancement.

            Expectation C


            introductions too long to put at the start

            The way UK government treats manufacturing is still important to anyone selling UK-made products, because it's hard to explain that UK manufacturers were effected by fiddled-exchange rates.

            students ... aware of how economics can be applied to design, guide and interpret commercial, economic, social and environmental policy. As part of this, they have the ability to discuss and analyse government policy and to assess the performance of the UK and other economies, past and present - Quality Assurance Agency benchmark .
            Customers might know that Churchill joined the gold standard in the 1930s, closing a lot of UK manufacturing to achieve a near 25% non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, that the Luftwaffe closed a lot of it in the 1940s, and that Churchill ordered the Bletchley Park computer to be broken up after 1945, stunting a new industry before it started, and that councils tend to demolish a lot of workshop space on any pretext - even the Olympics. Customers don't know about the 1979-2009 blitz caused by a monetary policy of exchange-rate fiddling to promote cheaper imports, that journalists and politicians are still quite keen on the idea, and that alternatives like helping industry work well are not asked-for. Customers know that big orders from China are cheaper, but they don't know that there is a whole range of areas where UK manufacturers could make smaller quicker orders or specialised ones or sell direct to sympathetic customers to cut the costs of a shop. It just takes a patience for lead times and ability to buy what the factory is used to making. Nor are customers schooled to promote good government by buying goods from well-governed countries, rather than buying from countries where there is poverty that causes a population explosion and so goods made for next to nothing. I have a blog post about this after visiting a consensus-building exercise at Labour Behind the Label. Development economics is taught separately from the need for a welfare state in developing countries. Lastly, the word "welfare" is American; government ministers still have trouble understanding the main insurance-like role of the UK state. That is something that better economics courses could help them with.

            Textbooks quote stuff which is simply wrong

            While writing this blog post I bought a second-hand copy of the brick-thick 779-page textbook called Begg that we used on my 1980s degree. It's well-written for a narrow purpose. It would be a good backup to example-based lectures on the same subject taught at the same time. The micro-economics of one or two industries taught, chapter-by-chapter, alongside the introductory micro-economics in the textbook. Further up this page I give quotes where it seems to say one thing in order to fit-in with conventional teaching about unemployment or monetary policy, and then puts a completely different view that's much more important in a little-reach chapter later-on. The Times newspaper was written like that in the 1980s, after a new proprietor took-over and told the staff to agree with Thatcher. It would say "Unemployment getting better, says minister for employment", and then right at the end of the article it would say "blob: fact fact fact fact fact fact fact fact which all show that the article just above is rubbish".
            Enabling student development and achievement: providers ... have in place, monitor and evaluate arrangements and resources which enable students to develop their academic, personal and professional potential. - Quality Assurance Agency expectation
            Fed-up with Begg at college, I searched the book-shop and found two McMillan books for revision which looked more concise and grown-up. I was wrong on the second point; the more technical economics books are worse. They turned-up on my shelf, decades later, well-hacked with corners cut-off alternate chapter pages, post-it notes, highlighting in two colours and notes in the margins. Macro-Economics, an introduction to Keynesian-Neoclassical Controversies, by Rosalind Lecic and Alexander Rebman, second edition, with The McMillan Dictionary of Modern Economics to match. On p 346 my chosen textbook says "The analysis also implies that if the government attempts to bring down the rate of inflation, unemployment will temporarily rise above the natural rate if expected inflation adjusts with a lag". I wrote "cold shower metaphor" in the margin. Then it's got a bit of the usual prejudice blaming everything on workers and unions causing unemployment by asking for wages, rather than governments fiddling the exchange rate and workers having no control over badly-run companies nor a chance to set-up better ones. It's not very relevant to the UK economy where 1970s inflation had been caused by Arab oil price rises, as we now know in 2015 because falling oil prices keep it down. The textbook finds this monetary policy respectable: "real wages rise and employment falls". This was strikingly obvious in the early 80s, except for the real wage rises, "but as expected inflation falls the short run Phillips curve shifts downwards and the natural rate of unemployment is restored once actual and expected rates of inflation are equal". In the margin I wrote "unless your employer goes bust". The Begg textbook had un-mentioned chapters admitting that real life was different, but in this textbook the next paragraph is just called "The Keynesian counter argument", but it can't be very good because it's hidden behind algebraic shorthand or semaphore or such and I wrote "Duff" at the top. To read this is a bit like sitting in a civil war with two historians talking in your ears about how more nuanced arguments reveal different facets of whether either side are good or bad leaders; it's controversy to please the external course examiners, but not controversy to tell the students what to expect after college.
            degree-awarding bodies use external and independent expertise at key stages of setting and maintaining academic standards to advise on whether UK threshold academic standards are set, delivered and achieved - Quality Assurance Agency expectation a graduate should ... demonstrate knowledge and awareness of the historical and policy contexts in which specific economic analysis is applied - Quality Assurance Agency threshold

            Digression on one of the reasons to start writing

            At one point in the 2000s I had a tactical reason to get career beneft that led to this blog post a decade later, trying to un-pick the rivals to my business spawned by London Fashion Week and other taxpayer budgets.

   is a guide

            An un-accountable inter-departmental dictat without minister's name or budget co-incided with the interests of a PR agency called Futerra that did a huge amount of governement work and the cross-ministry headings of work by the Crafts Council, the British Council, DEFRA, Department for International Development, Development Studies courses sponsored by UK taxpayers in countries like Bangladesh, The V&A Museum's exhibition of items including dresses from "Juste", a fictional dress company. A slush fund called London Development Agency, and another called the Higher Education Funding Council could find whatever fashion courses they wanted to fund and funded various ISSUU online publications as course materials for fashion students who were to be taught the new truth. A long sentence conveys my sense of information available or not available to taxpayers.

            Juste, Junky Styling, Pants to Poverty, Worn Again, Terra Plana, Ciel, Sari Dress Project and their trade association subsidised by a Bangladeshi trade association that in turn was subsidised by DfID was Ethical Fashion Forum. Which has a page urging people not to buy UK-made products on ethical grounds, for reasons including a pretended ignorance of the welfare state which has costs built-in to the price of every product made in the UK. These brands tried to work with another tax-paid-for slush fund called London Fashion Week, and a room called "estethica" was established which sounds a bit like "ethical" which means nothing because it is a word about types of other words rather than anything more specific.

            This excess of the 2000s decade is on the wane but there is a chance that I might meet some of its proponents, who used my tax cash to try to put me out of business, and a sense of where we are coming from might be useful. I worked-out that the fictional Juste brand was set-up to justify a second masters degree at Brooks Uni by someone who didn't have a first degree but brushed that under the carpet, along with the fictional nature of Juste. It was meant to be a dress company that was not certified as fair trade nor production in a welfare state like the UK, but some new meaningless category called just "ethical" - a word coined by someone working in central africa for a UN agency to do rather specialised things for which he could thnk of no precise word, and for which he did not need to think of a precise word because he got the subsidy anyway. I have sat in a room with a rep from London College of Fashion who said something like "I don't know how we got money for the fashion project in africa but it was very generous".

            Given this wave of public-funded kamikazee economics, I was reminded of my own experience studying the subject at Keele, and became interested in the motives and backgrounds of these other people. Some of them seemed quite genuine in their beliefs after studying courses like Economics at UK universities. Now that their cause is out of fashion nobody can divert taxpayer money towards them in a legal way, there is probably no need for me to meet them, but this idea of trying to remember what I learned on a course decades ago came partly of that need - to find what I had in common with other ignorant people who had been on bad courses.

            Digression on an imaginary conversation with
            Levacic and Rebman

            I would like to meet Rosalind Levacic, ex Open University, and Alexander Rebman, ex Middlesex Uni, to ask whether their courses were eventually closed-down for failing to demonstrate knowledge of the historical and policy context, and sticking to the fictional closed economy with a single workforce bidding for work which existed in the head of someone called Hicks in 1937 and it still talked-about seriously in their book. There are much more and important and obvious questions facing students in the lecture theatre - like jobs you can't get by bidding lower, or can't make a living it - and much more obvious causes of recession like a fiddled exchange rate, recessions in overseas markets, and the separate effects of north sea oil on the exchange rate. I suppose Levacic or Rebman would ask me why I paid for the book if I didn't want it, and it's hard to anticipate the conversation beyond that point but experience from my 1980s course is that they'd change the subject to Chi-squared and theta decimated to avoid the obvious. I didn't get a chance to meet Levacic and Rebman but I did find some obscure journal in the library which said something about the elasticity of unemployment for every-day jobs. Industrial Relations Bulletin of 1986 guesses that doubled unemployment had brought wages down 7-10% ; raised minimum wages, decades later, reduced employment by a rather small amount. There are lots of notes like this in the margin of my Levacic text book, some of them just saying "crap".

            Digression on adding machines

            Maybe the reason for squaring before averaging to get a standard deviation was to show that stats experts were a rank above book keepers who could use machines. Through the 1950s and 60s there were sheet-metal computers using the same technology as old-fashioned shop tills but without the pop-up numbers and the cash drawer. They were called adding machines. The grander ones were called accounting machines and could add, subtract, print on an account sheet, print the same numbers onto a rent book or a payment card, and the same again onto an account card. The cards had a notched bottom edge so you could lay them out in a special notched card trolly, showing the right hand column of each card. It was wonderful to watch. My dad had an accounting machine. They were made by Jubilee Engineering in Scandinavia I think, or Art Metal in the UK. The largest organisations like the US immigration department had a punched card system from firms like IBM that could be read by machine as well as printed. Leslie Fishman was an early user of SPSS software that used this kind of technology to read a database of punched cards at University of Colorado. The software ran on ICL or IBM unix machines like the mainframe at Keele. At the modest end of the market, people used adding machines to fill-in carbon-paper duplicate spreadsheets by hand in deadbeat jobs like working for a housing association. Stonham Housing Association still used them in the 80s. There were special printed sheets and called Gilbert Sheets with special chrome and leather clip boards, or English Churches Housing used Kalamazoo. I suppose that maths teachers wanted to show-off the squaring scales on slide rules with the fancy calculations like squares and square roots for standard deviation.

            Digression about Newton and Pythagoras

            The grand tradition of economics is also bad; of no interest to people who have done an A-level and want to learn more. I don't know what the tradition is precisely - nobody does - but I know that it is bad and think that students are misled when they sign-up and that's why they give bad scores for "staff made the subject interesting" - even more than students of pharmacy or accountancy, because economics students expected something else. They get a tradition of hard mathematical science; a tradition of teaching that Newton invented gravity because he was a genius, and Pythagoras invented the number three-and-a-bit because he was a genius, and you student had better darn learn this daft story as you learn religion from the preacher-man and his big book with the crosses on it. If you have your own idea in this scheme, it isn't true until peer-reviewed in a journal; students are asked to copy the textbooks if they want a qualification. Textbooks copy the journals and journals are written by academics who want a job or to increase Keele Economics Journal Ranking for some pointless reason. It's a self-referential system.

            Digression about science teaching

            I did a science subject at school, called Nuffield Physics, and it was good. On the web site see Teachers > Secondary > Physics and click on a subject like "waves" to see what I mean. We learnt wave patterns (electrical magnetic and physical - they're the same) from our own weights and springs. The course should have thrown-in some music theory as well. We needed special help from the teacher for nuclear physics. The Nuffield Foundation had commissioned polystyrene ping-pong balls the right size so that when glued into an atom shape and revolved on a turntable, they reflected microwaves in the same way as early experiments into nuclear physics. We also learned that when someone resorts to shorthand algebra to explain something, they're bluffing. They're making a simple thing complicated. There's no need. I think this could be why music technology gets bad reviews in colleges nowadays: students know wave patterns from electronics courses, see the same again in music theory courses, and see somone messing around with jargon and shorthand instead of combining the two. The grand tradition has its own history in each subject - often a great one. The scientific method is great. But Mr Doherty, the Eng. Lit. teacher in leather trousers taught us that there were Augustans and Romantics, and that the Augustan idea of knowledge and teaching was a bit like a letterbox: knowledge is posted-in at the start of the course to make sure it has a chance to get there; at the end of the course it is examined whether this knowledge remains in the letterbox. Somehow this differed from the Romantic idea of knowledge in the Eng. Lit. Augustans and Romantics course that's more about people discovering what is in themselves already. I wish Mr Doherty, the Eng. Lit teacher, had explained this to Mr Fishman, the Economics teacher, but now they are both dead; it's up to us who read this. (Side-track: they probably had odd job titles. End of side-track). Oh, I read that the Department of Education has interered in their three exam board's science syllabuses. After seeing what they did for grammer, I suppose they interfere for the worse.

            Digression on journal articles

            Take the question of what people do after college. has some of the stuff you'd expect; you'd expect really good economists to have some special way of writing about the data or obtaining it or generally be good at something. is a the first example that came-up of an economics journal article. It's a bamboozelement exercise written, I guess, to increase one college's statistics for staff writing in academic journals. I don't know what the algebra means. I think that students, like Nuffield Physics students, should be able to opt-out of this game and do something more sensible under a slightly different name, like "sensible economics"; there should be no need to understand what the algebra means, before deciding that it's not useful. Just as there should be no need to understand what's in a homoeopathy degree before deciding not to study homoeopathy, theology, or anything stupid.

            Digression on post-crash economics

            Post-crash economics is a new phrase for an old frustration, and this post looks twice as long as it really is because it peters-out and then shows pinched-and-pasted stuff from the post crash economics society at the end. Thirty years after I was at college, Internet learning has got way better but face-to-face teaching has fewer hours in the timetable. Some teachers still use the those hours as an excuse for teaching textbooks rather than facts and shorthand algebra rather than reasons, and some college managers ignore bad reviews because their budgets make so much money from this cheap-to-run bad economics degree course. Students are using the internet to discover what course is worth the trouble but discover that the newspaper economics league tables are simply wrong - terrible courses and good ones co-exist among different subjects at the same colleges, while the league tables tend to average-out the scores and put the same colleges at the top and bottom of each table. I hope that students kill the algebra-fetish courses that do so much damage by giving bad reviews or asking questions before choosing the course, so that something better can take their place. I hope that future teachers help students discover economics, rather than learn it from a work-book, if it's quicker to teach that way. Break The Guardian reports polite protest by students at a syllabus that is divorced from the real world, as does BBC Radio 4. If the material taught isn't bad enough, the way it's taught is "£9,000 lobotomy" at courses like the one at Glasgow University. What they don't say is that it is a scam. It charges £9,000 to first year students from England and Wales to play with a computer and hand-in an essay that gets 100% for being handed-in on time. For some reason, journalists choose plumbers as examples of scam-merchants rather than universities or trades unions. It is much easier to prove bad service from a plumber and much harder to prove bad service from an economics department charging £9,000, so they are not quoted on Rogue Traders where they belong.

            Digression on overly mathmatical economists

            Someone called Tim Leunig who writes sensible-looking stuff the The Guardian says so. He quotes several economics degree courses preferring applicants with lots of maths A-levels and no economics A-level please. He just says it as though obvious, so I wonder why and have to guess some ideas. (1) Science teachers generally don't scoff at silly maths; Nuffield science teachers are the minority, and they don't scoff at it either but quietly demonstrate it to be un-necessary. So the thought that it is silly comes as a surprise to economics degree teachers. (2) Teaching is an unstable market because people from less employable subjects are most keen to get jobs as teachers in Latin, Ancient Greek, Maths, anything like that and so the subject is easy for college administrators to supply. All they need to do is con the student applicants that it is worth studying by calling it "Economics" instead of "Maths". (3) My hunch is that economics students want to learn how to interpret tables of data about topical subjects, using computer software and critically-understood rules of thumb like the X-shaped diagram. The more obscure mathmatics only has to be done once, by the person who writes the software; economists only have to know enough to remember what it's doing and its limitations. If this wasn't a digression and had a big place on the page, I would have a look at each of Tim Leug's Guardian articles and try to guess whether they took any more maths than his stats program and any less critical thought than other university subjects.

            Digression on how this blog post comes about

            I sometimes blog about bad economics. That reminded me that once, years ago, I did an economics and english degree with short courses, so I wondered: "what did I learn?" for two or three reasons.
            One: I discover that others have the same frustration, hoping to study the economic crisis outlined in Robert Peston books and how politicians respond, but finding a course of computer multiple choice tests about X-shaped diagrams. I had a very similar frustration during the 1980s pillage of UK manufacturing that continued till 2009 in application of exchange-rate fiddles meant to reduce inflation, and continues to the time of writing in application of free-trade theory to countries with lower costs for the lack of a welfare state and because this leads to a population explosion.
            This is relevant to my job of trying to sell UK-made footwear.
            Two: Oxford Economics publishes reports commissioned by the Greater London Authority to justify crap like the Olympics or "The Value of Fashion", a long pdf document about why the Greater London Authority should spend money on PR for frocks rather than regional development of job prospects as suggested in the name of the EU grant they spend, which is called "regional development grant" not "taxpayer-funding for Chinese frocks grant", which has the opposite effect I think. Oxford Economics give away an Excel macro for double-checking their figures, and I hope one day to download it and learn how to use it for just that purpose.
            Three: I wonder how to present myself to lobby groups promoting opposite opinions, namely supporters of free trade with Bangladesh, subsidies to better Bangladeshi employers, diversion of EU regional development grants to the London region towards boosting the same, and a similar but more generic and less micro-managed economic policy for China or Vietnam or any other country in the world that's cheap because of over-population caused by the lack of a welfare state. One solution is to expose these groups as lobby groups, but another is to try to suggest a better solution, and for that purpose I need to look like a real person with real reasons for coming to a point of view. Those who write web sites to promote concepts like "ethical fashion" come to this form a different angle to me, but share a vague aquainance with economic theory; they quote phrases like "comparative advantage". If I can put by economic training online, without pretension, that can only be good.

            Free bonus afterthought: what did a Belstaff motorbike jacket look like?

            IBond Buggies were made in Tamworth until production ceased before the 1979 change in economic policy, so maybe economic policies are not to blame for every failure of manufacturing. I think Belstaff did close during the 1980s recession so they'd be a better example to quote. There were also some posh pot makers who kept going with their chintz and figurines, and a factory making cast steel parts for bicycles.
            Macro economics ought to cover why politicians have so much difficulty spending money on insurance-like services, such as social care, rather than paying for things best done in the private sector like paying for interesting pointy things and bond buggys.

            Free bonus afterthought: how long should you hold a grudge?

            I had forgotten most of Keele University's economics teaching except the good bits, which is what human beings to do. The filter that helps you survive day-to-day is different to the filter that helps you survive when looking-back, and I'm only looking back because unable to do a bit of software now at age 50 and do this as a distraction. But now I re-discover memories, the question comes-up: is it good to dredge-up a name after 30 years? A witty man who had done a boring job for decades? Easy compared to criticising people who are still alive and even employed at Keele, for their sake and mine because they might have better memories, better records, answer-back and prove me wrong about something which would be hard work on both sides. Fair because my dad did a degree, I did a degree, people I know have done degrees, and I think I have some background idea of expectations when I check them against the bureaucratic benchmarks. 1980s Keele economics was different to my background idea and different to the benchmark. Some lectured or taught well, but the course was as described above. If the boss with his MI5-recorded background has left lots of records to say why, that would be a really good thing for somebody to research when these records reach the National Archive in a few decades. Reason says: this is necessary because education is a bit like restoring old cars - great when it is done well and awful when done badly because it is hard to sue for something so vague as bad education or a bad second hand car. Therefore the world needs reviews of people who restore second hand cars just as it needs reviews of educators. There is a review system between colleges. I'd like to see a few reviewers from different types of course, just to stop on discipline like Economics falling so far behind the standards of others. Gut feeling says: more please. I am angrier now, with perspective, than I was in 1983 when my "attitude has been noted by all members of the department", starting with Dr Johns while the syllabus and teaching style was set by a bluffer called Professor Les Fishman who probably fiddled his CV and did as much as possible by teaching Samuelson by wrote. My gut feeling is angry with the peer review teachers from other colleges who saw the scam and wrote "don't close this course just yet - they have a problem with lack of timetable space and choose to spend two hours a week teaching manual computation of stats years after computers have become domestic appliances, so it's difficult for them". It is not difficult. There is no excuse for teaching manual computation in 1985. I want to know the names of the people were who signed-off this course as OK and how bad their courses were if they thought this was pretty typical. My gut feeling is angry with college management with their funny job titles and nasty treatment of students, for thinking it was OK to allow this man to continue in post. They were also the people who took over the student union building the year I left, apparently, and had it decorated like McDonalds, so they are clearly unpleasant people in the judgements they make, but even so they should have had some system for finding out if this course was a rip-off to students.

            Social awkwardness says: one teacher at Keele is still working from the time I was there and one or two are retired. Lots of people do little bits of work at colleges like teaching one bit of a course or one lecture or supervising MA students and I know nothing about any of those people. It's awkward, but constructive feedback is welcome. Politics says: this post ought to be about Alan Walters, the economist who closed so much UK manufacturing. Somehow, that disaster of a man gained credibility as a government advisor more powerful than the chancellor, on the back of a stupid job like teaching economics in the USA. Somehow, he is still remembered with a filter of denial, just as Fishman is still remembered with a filter of denial at Keele. If anyone ever tried to be one of Alan Walters students and can write something like this, they'd do the world a favour.
            *M1 M2 M3 and M4 are the short money supply titles. Banchees Leprechauns Pookahs and Dullahans are the longer titles. There is no doubt that these things exist, but some doubt as to how much they influence events.

   has as many references and quotes as I can find for Leslie Fishman, including a 5,800 word article and being part of a team to make a 1960s punch-card database on unemployment statistics for reading by computer.

            Odd cut-and-paste quotes from Thorsten Veblen on learning. Paragraph breaks are stripped-out by mistake. Even to-day there are such things in the usage of the learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation, and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees, dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a scholarly apostolic succession. And as commonly happens with mediators between the vulgar and their masters, whether the masters be natural or preternatural, he found it expedient to have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon the vulgar the fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might ask of them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. So far as they possess them, the lower and less reputable branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed these things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence among the practical schools, without the sanction of the continued example of the higher and classic grades, would be highly improbable, to say the least. nice quote about thrift and industriousness here there is some tendency latterly to substitute the captain of industry in place of the priest, as the head of seminaries of the higher learning. The substitution is by no means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of institutions are best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with a high degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less pronounced tendency to in trust the work of instruction in the higher learning to men of some pecuniary qualification. Administrative ability and skill in advertising the enterprise count for rather more than they once did, as qualifications for the work of teaching. This applies especially in those sciences that have most to do with the everyday facts of life, and it is particularly true of schools in the economically single-minded communities. This partial substitution of pecuniary for sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern transition from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as the chief means of reputability. The correlation of the two facts is probably clear without further elaboration. There are plenty more paragraphs in the same style about how economics is complicated out of a sort of status-hungry snobbery

            Unfortunately this blog post is too long for the software and attempts to read any comments time-out; they can't be read by anyone, including me.
            I hope to move it to Wordpress of split it up at some point


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