I move straight on to save time. The next item of business is a statement by John Swinney on education reform. The cabinet secretary will take questions at the end of his statement, so there should be no interventions or interruptions. Presiding Officer, in June I set out our vision for education and our proposals for reform. The Government's clear ambition is to create a world-class education system closing the gap between our least and most disadvantaged children a llungell gwydigol wych yn lleol. It is an ambition that is shared widely across the system and across the chamber. There are many strengths in Scottish education, but we also have to recognise that, right now, our system is still too variable. We want excellence in every school for every child. That is what these reforms are designed to do. They are based on the simple, well-evidence premise. Those closest to children and young people, those who know them best, their parents', teachers and head teachers, gyda'r best place to make decisions about their education. I recognise that if schools are to fully deliver on this leadership of learning role, then they must be supported by the entire education system. We must work together across school, local authority and national boundaries to provide that support. That is what the OECD called on us to do when they assessed our education system in 2015 and that is what our reforms will deliver. I'm therefore pleased to be able to update Parliament today on the progress that we have made on our reform plans. As promised, as part of the next steps report that I published on 15 June, my officials, along with Education Scotland, COSLA, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland entered into a joint process to deliver this new way of regional working. In June, we set out the key functions of the regional collaboratives. They were to support teachers through dedicated teams of professionals drawing on Education Scotland staff, local authority staff and others, to provide focus across the delivery of an annual regional plan and work programme and to deliver collaborative working, including sharing best practice. We have now reached agreement with COSLA on the collaboratives and these functions have been agreed to provide the enhanced support of schools' need in order to raise attainment and close the poverty-related attainment gap. Our partners in local government have agreed that the task that we have set out in the regional bodies, that list of functions that we set out in June, is the right way forward, will deliver out for our school pupils and support Scotland's teachers. Our schools and teachers need consistently excellent support to secure the improved outcomes that we all want and Scotland's children and young people deserve. The regional improvement collaboratives focus on meeting local needs, putting getting it right for every child at the heart of their work and delivering a relentless focus on improvement. We will ensure the provision of excellent educational improvement support for head teachers, teachers, managers and practitioners through dedicated teams of professionals. Those teams will draw on Education Scotland staff, local authority staff and others. They will share expertise, innovation and best practice across the collaborative and will draw on knowledge from other regions where and when it is needed. They will ensure the provision of specialist support and advice across all eight curriculum areas with a clear focus on literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing, reinforcing the approach set out by the chief inspector of education in August 2016. They will also identify the particular areas for improvement in their region and ensure that interventions are put in place to address them. They will facilitate access to sector-specific support and advice, working with partners across the system to ensure that we get it right for every child. They will build capacity and support in improvement methods, helping schools to implement key educational developments and learn from other systems and research. Our programme for government set out our intention to bring forward an education bill this session. Our agreement with local government means that we will not have to wait on that bill to make progress on reform. I can tell Parliament today that the regional collaboratives will be up and running this year supporting our schools and teachers with pace and with focus. To deliver this regional improvement leads will be appointed in six regions by the end of this month, and each collaborative will have a detailed improvement plan in place by January 2018. Those plans will be bottom-up drawing on the needs that schools identify and delivering a clear focus across all partners. They will bring rigor and structure to the work of the collaboratives and will empower local partners to identify local priorities and develop local practices. The leadership of the collaboratives will therefore be critical to enhancing the support that our schools receive. I have agreed with COSA that the regional improvement lead will be selected jointly by the chief inspector of education and the local authorities that make up the individual improvement collaboratives. The improvement plans and the workforce plans will be formulated at local level but will require to be agreed with the chief inspector of education. I am clear that those reporting arrangements will ensure that there is a system-wide responsibility to support our schools in closing the attainment gap and providing excellence and equity for all. Education Scotland's announcement today that they are deploying their staff to work alongside teachers through the regional improvement collaboratives is a significant element in the early implementation of this reform. This is a radical and welcome step to ensure that the resources of Education Scotland staff are used to create a cohesive and effective package of support to deliver improvement where it matters in our schools. This is the first time that such an approach has been taken and it will maximise the improvement resources available to our schools. I am determined to ensure that the formation of regional improvement collaboratives moves ahead with pace. Therefore, I will commission an external review of our progress in establishing those bodies and in assessing progress in fulfilling their potential, firstly in April 2018 and then 12 to 18 months thereafter. The second aspect of this update is on teachers. I recognise that some councils face challenges in teacher recruitment as do universities in recruiting teaching students and I am committed to tackling those challenges. We are delivering our teaching makes people recruitment campaign, increasing the number of places available in teacher education programmes and funding a series of new routes into teaching. What is more, I believe that our commitment to work with the profession to enhance the teaching career structure will help to attract and retain talented professionals. New and exciting courses have already been made available to attract teachers. Masters degrees allow teachers to work across both the primary and secondary sectors, primary qualifications with specialisms in science or additional support needs and the provision that allows students to qualify across a 52-week period rather than the traditional model are just some examples of the new programmes. We need to do more. We want to make a career in teaching more accessible to a wider range of graduates and help to address the current recruitment challenges, particularly in priority subjects. I am therefore pleased to confirm that we are today inviting new proposals for routes into teaching. Those will support ambitious and innovative routes specifically for high quality new graduates or those considering a career change. It is essential, however, that all teacher education programmes including new routes are of the highest quality. Let me be clear that any new route will require the involvement of a university to maintain academic rigor and accreditation also by the General Teaching Council for Scotland. They are the guardians of quality and all routes into teaching must meet their standards. The final element of this update on education reforms is in relation to inspection. Education Scotland announced this morning that they are significantly increasing school inspection with an increase of over 30 per cent beginning in April 2018, building on the increased plan already for this year. That will strengthen the role of inspection as a crucial tool to support improvement. Not only does inspection provide assurance about the quality of education, it also identifies what is working well and what needs to improve. I am pleased that as a result of their inspection process, Education Scotland looks at how schools and establishments are working collaboratively with others and will share examples of what works. This is one of a range of improvement approaches that Education Scotland has announced today to enable them to reach every school every year through a variety of channels of approach. Presiding Officer, I told Parliament in June that I was determined to put in place essential reforms to ensure that we create a relentless focus on improvement in our schools. I indicated that I would work with local government to achieve those aims. I am pleased that we have been able to reach agreement with councils and as a result can make swift progress on putting those reforms in place. We now have an agreed way forward on school education that will see all parts of the system, the Scottish Government, local councils and national agencies pulling in the same direction. A shared goal to raise standards and close the attainment gap, a single plan working together to support our schools and a clear vision that every child can reach their full potential. There is good news for teachers and great news for Scotland's young people. Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. Cabinet Secretary will now take questions on the issues raised in his statement. I intend to allow around 20 minutes for questions after which we must move on to the next item of business that will be the help of those members who wish to ask a question and would press the request-to-speak buttons. Now, and I call on Liz Smith. We follow by Ian Gray, Ms Smith, please. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer and thank you, Cabinet Secretary, for a prior site. Can I ask three specific questions? First, what is the estimated cost to the taxpayer of those changes, especially given the enhanced role that Education Scotland is apparently going to have and the new staffing and administration changes which are set out in section 5 of the interim report? Secondly, in relation to that enhanced role for Education Scotland and today's announcement that there will be increased number of school inspections, there is not just another reason why HMIE should be completely separate of Education Scotland, so there is not judge and jury at the same time with far too much conflicting work on its plate. Thirdly, you state that each collaborative will have a workforce plan which will reflect, and I quote, national, regional and local priorities. Can I ask you to clarify, Cabinet Secretary, if you are a headteacher with specific proposals about how you want to spend your pupil equity fund, will you be required to have permission from the regional collaborative before it is spent or will there be genuine devolution of power to the headteacher? Cabinet Secretary. On the first point that Liz Smith raised on the costs, obviously we are pulling together resources that are available within a number of different elements of the education system, but doing that in a very focused way to ensure that schools are able to have access to and make calls upon the improvement resources that are available in a cohesive way, which is not currently the practice within Scottish education. The resources that have been allocated from within Education Scotland will be focused increasingly at a local level working with the resources that are available in local authorities and ensuring a coherent approach is taken. Obviously there will be discussions to be had with the regional collaboratives as they formulate their plans about the scale of their activities and the areas of particular activity. Obviously the Government will engage in those and assess very carefully any implications that emerge in terms of budgetary pressures as a consequence. On the second point in relation to the role of a Majesty's Inspectorate of Education, I have listened carefully to the arguments that have been made on this point. I think that it is important to put on the record one vital aspect of my thinking in this respect. I see the purpose of inspection to aid and to assist improvement within our education system. The whole purpose of the regional collaboratives, the whole purpose of the agenda that I have set out today is about reinforcing that focus on improvement. I have used the words for a relentless focus on improvement. For that reason, her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education has an integral role to perform within Education Scotland, but it is an approach that has to be taken with the necessary respect and regard to the independence of that inspection process. I want to make sure that our education system is able to benefit and see the fruits of that scrutiny that is undertaken for inspection purposes, but it should be clearly understood that the purpose of that inspection is to aid and to assist the improvement journey within Scottish education. Finally, on pupil equity funding, my answer is simple.  That is its purpose. The head teachers that we engage with and we engage extensively with head teachers about the delivery of pupil equity funding want to have a reasonable amount of guidance as to what will be effective utilization of their pupil equity funding, but they want to be able to take the decisions about how to allocate those resources. That is my perspective as well. I have already told Parliament that there have been a number of occasions where I have raised with local authorities my dissatisfaction with the way in which undue limitations are being applied to pupil equity funding and I have no hesitation in reiterating my view this afternoon that I see head teachers as being the ones who should be the decision makers on this point within a framework of guidance that is designed to help not to hinder them in their decision making. Iain Gray, do we follow by Ross Greer? Thank you, Presiding Officer, and thank you to the Cabinet Secretary for Early Sight of his statement. The compromise that he has reached regarding regional collaboratives is welcome and leaves the leadership of these collaboratives accountable to local, rather than central, Government. All credit then to councils and to Councillor McCabe in particular from COSLA for working through this compromise. However, if the collaboratives are to succeed as well, hope they will in raising attainment, like every part of our education system, they need more resources, not just pooled resources, and they need an end to the cut. Councils have helped with Mr Swinney's collaboratives what help can he promise them in return with regard to education funding. It is also welcome that Education Scotland promises more inspections next year than this, but we are not going to be able to compare numbers with a decade ago since it transpires that it has destroyed all inspection records pre-2008. Has the Cabinet Secretary taken them to task for this act of bureaucratic vandalism? If not, why not? First of all, I say to Mr Gray that if he reached carefully the proposal that has been agreed between local government and national government, and I welcome the discussions that I have had with Councillor McCabe and others that have been entirely fruitful discussions as part of this exercise. The accountability in the formulation of regional improvement plans, the workforce plans and that relentless focus on improvement will not just be local accountability, it will be national accountability as well, because the plans, the appointment of regional improvement leads and the workforce plans will all have to be agreed with the chief inspector of education. That is a very important element of the arrangements that we have put in place. That is essential to make sure that we have the clear and relentless focus on improvement. Mr Gray asked me about resources for education, and I am pleased that resources in education are increasing, not least of which because of the decisions that this Government has taken in connection with the local authority settlement and in connection with pupil equity funding. I can assure Mr Gray that the Government will take appropriate decisions in relation to the funding of local authorities and pupil equity funding in its forthcoming budget statements later this year. Finally, in relation to the issue on education Scotland records, what I would say to Mr Gray is this. Education Scotland holds the most recent inspection report for every individual school that has been inspected. That position was clarified at the tail end of last week. Education Scotland retains the ability to say when a school was last inspected by referring to paper-based records for each particular school. Some historical information was not held centrally and some electronic information was deleted not by Education Scotland but by its predecessor body, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education. Information on individual schools inspected was not collated or retained centrally until after an internal audit recommendation in March 2006, which I would remind Mr Gray was before this Government came to office. I appreciate the importance of there being consistency in the information that is available in all respects to attach the highest value to that information, which is why the chief inspector of education is taking the reasonable steps that he is taking to make sure that that information is readily available to all who require that information. I have 11 members wishing to ask questions with your help and crisp questions and answers. I would hope to get through them all. I call Ross Gray to follow by Mike Rumbles. I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of his statement. The Scottish Government has met a number of times recently with Teach First. In England, it costs £38,000 to train a teacher through Teach First compared to £8,000 for the traditional postgraduate model in Scotland. Does the Scottish Government consider that good value for money or does it agree that it would be an inappropriate cost and not an appropriate new route into teaching in Scotland? Mr Gray invites me to go on to territory, which I think he probably well knows. I should take great care to go on to it since there is a procurement about the start. Obviously, I have set out to Parliament the details of that procurement, but I have set out to Parliament two very important foundations for that procurement. One, that any venture that comes forward must have an academic partner recruited to it. Secondly, that any proposition that comes forward must be approved by the General Teaching Council of Scotland. I assure Mr Gray and Parliament that the General Teaching Council applies very strong independent rigor to any proposal that comes forward. I have seen the scrutiny that has been applied to the new routes that have emerged quite recently, and that is a rigorous process of challenge by the General Teaching Council. I can assure Mr Gray and Parliament that that will be the case in any route that emerges as part of the procurement that the Government is undertaking. Mike Rumbles, well by Clare Haughey. Can the Education Secretary not see that Education Scotland cannot reasonably deploy staff to work alongside teachers through the regional improvement collaborative and setting policy, and at the very same time inspect how schools and establishments are working collaboratively? Education Scotland is set once again to mark its own homework. Is not there a clear need, therefore, to ensure that ineffective practice is not reinforced and clearly separate out these functions as my colleague Tavish Scott and others consistently have demanded? Cabinet Secretary. I think that this question comes back to the point, and I am very happy to debate this further with Parliament about the role of inspection. I see the role of inspection to assist us in driving improvement in our education system. For that reason, I think that there is an essential contribution that the inspection function under Her Majesty's Inspector of Education is able to make into the wider work of Education Scotland. I am very pleased with the progress that Education Scotland is making in responding to the challenge that I have set to change its way of working and the organisation has made a number of substantial announcements of changes of practice in recent weeks. That demonstrates the independent direction of Education Scotland, and I want to encourage that and also capture the information that comes from that to assist in improving Scottish education. Clare Haughey, followed by Liam Kerr. Can the Cabinet Secretary provide any reassurance over the role that local authorities will continue to play in the delivery of education and how he plans to maintain local democratic accountability? Local democratic accountability for education was never the issue at stake in those discussions. What was at stake was my desire to ensure that the whole system was focused in a coherent way and a cohesive way on leading improvement within the system. I am very pleased that, as a consequence of the discussions that I have had with local government, we have been able to agree on that point. Obviously, the voluntary agreement of local government to the regional improvement collaboratives is an important signal of the support of local government to the direction that has been set out in the paper that has been agreed between the Government and local authorities. It is important to ensure that accountability for this work is shared between national and local authorities, but in a fashion that works together to benefit the needs of young people throughout our education system. Liam Kerr, followed by Ruth Maguire. The cabinet secretary states that each improvement collaborative should draw on existing activity, connections and partnerships. If those are deemed to be working well enough, as the cabinet secretary said in the chamber on 19 June for the Northern Alliance, what grounds are there for imposing a new structure with additional costs to taxpayers at a time when the public finances are already very tight? I can confidently say that Liam Kerr has not listened to a word that I have said in my statement today, nor has he read a word of the agreement between national and local government, because the Northern Alliance and we all have listened to a word that I have said in Parliament for months, because the Northern Alliance is, in my view, a very good example of the type of collaboration that is in place. The problem is that it was the only collaborative at any sense of a developed proposition around the country. I do not know why Mr Kerr, as a north-east of Scotland member, cannot stand up and say that the model of the Northern Alliance has been built upon and taken to other parts of the country rather than finding something to have a whinge about. I encourage Mr Kerr to do a little bit of homework like the First Minister encouraged his party leader to do in First Minister's questions last week before he comes here and asks such ill-informed questions about what the Government has just announced. Can I say with respect, if we could have shorter answers, I might get some more folk in that very helpful Cabinet Secretary, Ruth McQuire followed by Daniel Johnson. Can the Cabinet Secretary confirm that developing new routes into teaching is not about getting people into the classroom faster but instead is about broadening the range of people entering the teaching profession? Cabinet Secretary. It is essential that we find different ways and different mechanisms to encourage and motivate other people who might contemplate a career in teaching to take up that role. The approaches that we have set out are designed to do that. They are designed to make sure that any individual who is teaching in our classroom is doing so with the authority of the General Teaching Council, which is the guardians of quality education system. The new routes that we are taking forward will have that requirement at the heart of their design. I can give Ruth McQuire that assurance today. We will have that consideration very much in our minds as we come to our conclusions on any approaches that we take. Daniel Johnson followed by Gillian Martin. The Deputy First Minister was at pains to emphasise national accountability in his answer to Ian Gray, and that the chief inspector would sign off on improvement plans. Can I ask what will happen if there is a disagreement between the chief inspector and the local collaboratives? Given that many of the concerns are around his proposals... No, one question is sufficient. I want to gather members in. Cabinet Secretary. The process is... The point that I was making to Mr Gray was to essentially give a completeness and to ensure that there is a proper opportunity to discuss and to challenge the formulation of regional improvement plans to make sure that they will be effective in supporting the national improvement framework. I would encourage a collaborative and co-operative dialogue between the chief inspector of education and the regional improvement collaboratives to reach agreement on what will be acceptable as plans for improvement in our education system. That is the thinking behind the model of accountability that we have settled upon. Gillian Martin, followed by Finlay Carson. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Will the cabinet secretary agree with me that the regional improvement collaboratives must be bottom up and that the needs of our schools must be driving the regional plan rather than the plan driving the needs of our schools? Cabinet secretary. The purpose of those reforms is to make sure that schools have access to their educational provision. The approach that Gillian Martin suggests is absolutely correct that we want to have schools in the driving seat of determining what are their needs, what are their requirements and the services that are available and the support that is available from regional improvement collaboratives should respond positively towards that. Finlay Carson, followed by James Dornan. Cabinet secretary, stated in response to Ross Greer on page 7 of your statement that you require both the involvement of university and accreditation with the general teaching council for Scotland in light of the recent encouraging comments from the Scottish Government. Can you please just ask your question? Can I ask the cabinet secretary what discussions are taking place with Scottish universities? Obviously, I meet the deans of the schools of education on a periodic basis to encourage developments in their own provision. We have engaged in these debates to ensure that we have an adequate supply of graduates coming into initial teacher education and we will continue that dialogue as we go into a procurement on this particular proposal. Our relationship has to be slightly different because some of the universities may have an interest in that but I can assure Mr Carson of a very regular dialogue with the universities to advance their involvement in the important area of teacher education. I welcome the announcement that there will be more staff from regional collaboratives but can the cabinet secretary expand a bit further on how he expects pooling resources to reduce the inconsistencies that we often see when it comes to education? What I am keen to ensure is that we have a much wider exchange of good practice and strong practice within the education system. That is at the heart of collaboration is what the OECD told us in 2015 was a weakness of our education system and I want us to respond to that as substantively as we possibly can do. The collaboratives will be working together to share good practice and to ensure that that is widely disseminated across our education system. Alison Harris. When the OECD reported on the school system in Scotland in 2016 it made reference to the fact that it was very hard to measure educational success because of the absence of good data to measure progress in the curriculum for excellence. What steps is the Scottish Government along with Education Scotland taking to collect this new data? Cabinet Secretary. We have already embarked on that by the collection of pupil level data on the achievement of individual levels at P1, P4, P7 and S3 within our education system. That is more comprehensive data than has ever been available in Scottish education before. It is published every December and, of course, from December 2018 it will be informed by the proceeds of standardised national assessments which the Scottish national standards assessments have now been rolled out in Scottish education and took effect in late August of this year and those assessments will help to inform teacher judgments which will be reported on every December. In addition to that I will be consulting shortly on the framework for assessing our progress in closing the attainment gap. That has to be broadly understood and accepted to make sure that it commands public confidence and I'll be consulting on that in the course of the period ahead to make sure that we have the right range of measures in place to assess our progress in closing the attainment gap. Very short question Mr Beattie Can the cabinet secretary expand further on the ideas that the international council of education advisers put forward recently on how to ensure students and their parents or carers are engaged and have a voice? There are some very good examples that Scottish education are now taking forward as a consequence of the call within the national improvement framework to encourage greater pupil and parent engagement in the development of the schools agenda. I think that some of the projects that I see in place in local areas I saw some very good projects that are referred to following a visit to the Pathhead primary school in Mr Torrance's constituency in Kirkcaldy and very good examples of parental engagement in the learning process within schools and obviously we share these good examples as widely as we possibly can do. Thank you, that concludes questions again. I thank the cabinet secretary and all members who finished to get all the questioners in. A short pause as we move on to the next item of business.


A very good morning to all of you and a warm welcome to this fourth workshop in our series of enemy ICT and IST workshops. This workshop as you all know is on engineering mechanics and it is the fourth one in our series so far in the second phase. We have already conducted workshops on engineering thermodynamics, database management and green buildings. This is of course I am talking about the second phase and we have about 7500 participants across the country. We have remote centers joining us from Jammu to Kanyakumari and Silschar to Surat. So we have more or less covered the entire country this time. It's my proud privilege here to welcome you all to this workshop. I would like to now invite Professor Kanan Modgalyan the PI to please come and grace the stage. I would also like Professor Servic Banerjee to please join us. Professor Bandar Inamdar could not join us today so it's only Professor Banerjee at the moment. Professor Inamdar will be joining us a little later on. I now invite Professor Kanan Modgalyan to share his thoughts upon this workshop and this entire project. So Modgalyan. Good morning to all of you. So I am really delighted to be here and now that we made a change and we are starting at 10 o'clock, hopefully many of you could have joined in your remote centers. I want to take this opportunity to explain this project, the mission that funds this activity. This activity is funded by the National Mission on Education through ICT, NME ICT, MHRD, Department of Higher Education, MHRD, Government of India. It started in 2009, launched in February, we got the funding in May. This mission has three important activities. One is connectivity, the aim of this mission is to provide one GBPS bandwidth to every one of our universities and using that also provide bandwidth to every one of the affiliating colleges. This means the 400 universities that were there at that time in 2009 and about 20,000 colleges that were in existence would get the bandwidth. So this and NKN project are similar activities. Many people confuse the NME ICT's bandwidth provision with that of NKN. These two are two different activities. You can think of this as two collaborative activities, I will explain why. This NME ICT tries to give bandwidth to every one of the 400 universities and the 20,000 plus affiliating colleges. The NKN tries to provide bandwidth, has provided bandwidth to 1,000 institutions. These need not be colleges, these could be research centers, for example, BARC and so on. Now of course, a lot of input for the NME ICT's bandwidth provision comes from NKN. We work in close collaboration. As a matter of fact, some of the infrastructure that has been established by NKN is used for NME ICT also. In fact, we hope that in the near future NKN will be able to take up NME ICT's network as well and run them both. In fact, I would like to acknowledge Mr. Mani, who is a senior director, technical director in NKN, who is a great friend of NME ICT. Now just to give an idea of what this entailed, basically the colleges, the universities in the NME ICT network got bandwidth to about 1% of the cost at that time. I will not go into the details, but to just to give some numbers, about three years ago, maybe four years ago, some universities got 1 GBPS bandwidth for 10 years at a cost from their side of 55 lakhs. That's about 500 lakhs per year for 1 GBPS bandwidth. So many universities have benefited and there are some that still haven't benefited. So we would like to invite all of them to join. The reason why I wanted to point out the cost was that NME ICT model involves some amount of payment from the colleges and the universities, but it is only nominal. So this is the connectivity part. Then the second part is the device. All of you would know about the famous Akash device. It is the world's cheapest, least expensive, but very powerful computing device. And then IIT Bombay is glad to be a part of that. We procured 100,000 tablets, that is, 1 lakh tablets at a cost of 2,263 rupees a piece. And the pilot, all the 1 lakh tablets have been delivered. We have distributed over 70,000 tablets to a large number of colleges. In fact, 250 remote centers of our T10KT project. In fact, these have become Akash testing centers. So the idea is that the students at various colleges will have access to this nice device. So what next? The government has agreed. Now, in fact, not just the government, even the news media that had a lot of complaints at the very beginning says only good things about the Akash project now. And Akash 4 specifications have been announced already. And then Professor Ashok Jinjin Vala is the coordinator of those specs committee. DGSND has already announced that, has announced the document and has invited expressions of interest from various people. I believe a large number of vendors have shown interest. Now, what next from our side? IIT Bombay will continue to develop applications for this. Now that the procurement and delivery has been taken away from us, we can concentrate on the thing that we really like namely developing content, e-content applications and so on and so forth for this device. I am personally looking at developing Akash as a computing device. In fact, I am particularly interested in the net book version of Akash. Just imagine what will happen if we can get a full blown Linux based Akash with a full blown keyboard like a net book, no hanging wires and so on, with a net book, full blown keyboard, track pad, a dual core or a quad core, 1.5 gigahertz and all kinds of things available for of the order of let us say about 5000 rupees. Just imagine what this will do to our education. What it will do to our children in the country who do not have access to computers. Most children can then aspire to have a computer of their own and of course, it may be possible to use them as to play Angry Birds and things like that as well but we will be able to cater to the educational needs of a very large society. So that is something really exciting. Coming back to this mission, this Akash device is actually a convergence device. Many of the things that we are developing will be delivered through Akash. I will explain that when I go on to go on to the next focus area of the mission that is the content generation. So you know the famous NPTEL, this is funded by NME ICT. A project of similar magnitude is at IIT Bombay, the talk to attain talk, it started as talk to a teacher project, now it has become a substantial part of it has become a project, a big project T10KT are trained 10,000 teachers and that is a project which is going on now and as a matter of fact, it started as a trained 1000 teacher program but because of the success and the popularity of this, it has been now expanded into a 10,000 teacher training program. So there were several other projects, there are several other projects that are funded by this activity, this contents part of it. I will mention a few. One of them was to support the live transmission of CDEAP courses, CDEAP stands for Centre for Distance Engineering Education program and you can think of this as something quite different from let us say NPTEL, NPTEL is a studio recorded course whereas our live transmission at that time at least was seen as a separate activity and then I remember the Chairman Board of Governors of TCS of College of Engineering Pune, Mr. FC Kohli who is also considered as the father of Indian IT sector telling me about the benefits of live transmission. For example, he wanted the COEP students to get a taste of IIT education. He wanted his students to get IIT experience. What is IIT experience? He explained. One, if the faculty members make mistakes, he wanted his students to see it. He wanted his students to know that it is okay to make mistakes. When the faculty members at IIT cracked jokes, he wanted his students to see, he wanted them to know that one does not have to be serious all the time. The same time, he also wanted his students to know that every lecture is delivered and delivered on time. He wanted his students to go and ask his some of the faculty members that look IIT faculty members are delivering every lecture, why don't you also please deliver. He wanted his faculty members to go and tell his students, IIT students are doing so much work, why are you refusing to do the work? So he believed that through the live transmission, you not only get the content, but you get the pedagogy how a course is taught. So in fact, I'm delighted to note that today's program started on the dot at 10 o'clock. In fact, I want to thank the team for helping start on time. Some of the other projects, we have a project called FOSI, free and open source software in education. And then through that, we are supporting at IIT Bombay, of course, collaborated by students and faculty members, teachers from all over the country. And so we have, we provide support to Sylab, Python, OpenFoam. OpenFoam is something many of you would be interested in. This is computational fluid dynamics software equivalent of Fluent. And in fact, our colleague in mechanical engineering, Professor Shiva, has been spearheading it. We would be delighted to conduct workshops for all your colleges. Of course, not as a part of this program, because we have a tight schedule. Similarly, we will do this for Sylab. The Python effort is headed by my colleague, Professor Prabhu Ramachandran. We have other activities like OSCAD for circuit design and OpenFormal for formal verification by Professor Suprati Chakravarty. Sorry, there are lots of names, and I have to recall some of the names. And then we have SIMPAI for simulation, coin OR for optimization. Once again it is done by our colleagues, Professor Jayendraan and Professor Ashutosh Mahajan. What I plan to do is, I believe I'll get one slot on 5th of December. I think it's a four o'clock slot. I request all of you to join me at that time. I will explain to you, hopefully I'll convince you why we should switch over to open source software. Initially, there were plans to conduct a Sylab workshop as a part of this program. But because of time schedule, we may skip it, but then we would organize it separately to every one of you, if you are interested in, in every one of your colleges through a team that we have called events team of the Spurcon tutorial activity. So I forgot to mention about Spurcon tutorial. Through that, we are conducting IT training all over the country. And we train close to one lakh students every year. Many colleges have, many universities are accepting this as an accepted curriculum. For example, the HV University with 77 affiliating colleges has introduced Spurcon tutorials as a curriculum for two of their programs. I'll talk more about it on Thursday 5th of December. We have E Yantra project at IIT Bombay, headed by Professor Kavi Arya. We have NPTEL, we have NPTEL I already mentioned, NPTEL is for theory courses, a similar activity is being conducted for carried out for laboratory program. This is the virtual labs program. It is coordinated by Professor Ranjan Bose of IIT Delhi. So these are some of the programs, of course, there could be some, well, actually there are several programs. I'm not able to talk about all of those in this short time. So that is, that in a nutshell is about NME ICT. I will take couple of minutes to talk about this particular course. First of all, I would like to acknowledge the presence of some important people who help achieve this. First of all, I would like to begin with Professor Sawik Banerjee, who is the instructor for this course. He and Professor Mandar Inandar have kindly agreed to deliver these lectures. Of course, you will see more of them in the rest of this course. And then I would like to acknowledge the presence of Professor Geithunde, who is a great friend to our project.  In fact, thanks to him, this activity has become very popular in mechanical engineering. So I would like to place our thanks. And then I would like to acknowledge some of the managers who help achieve this.  Some people tend to think that it is only the lecturing that forms the centerpiece of this and I, as a faculty member, was delivered many courses through this, back to differ. It's like this, supposing you write a small paper of five pages, so there is some amount of activity, administrative activity that we involve ourselves in. Just imagine putting together 200 such booklets. That's a complete book, let's say 1000 page book with coordination of all the participants, all the creators, everyone understanding, everyone speaking the same language. For example, you have to use the same symbol, you have to use the same language and so on and so forth. Just imagine how much work that is. So it is, I would say, several orders of magnitude. In a similar way, this course, where we have 10,000 teachers, of course it's a nomenclature, there are some courses in which we had had some 12,000 participants, 15,000 participants, some other programs we had 7,000, 7,500 and so on. But I believe that with time, this will become very popular for every subject, we will cross 10,000 mark. In any case, some of these are niche subjects. For example, engineering mechanics, although it is quite important, I believe in popularity, it is not so popular as Android. I mean, there is no denying of that, after all, supposing I compare my digital control book with Harry Potter, can there be any comparison? So even though some of these are a little more specialized courses, I believe that even these will reach more than 10,000. So this team has to work with coordinators, faculty members, funding, camera team, moodle team, registration process, all kinds of things. In contrast for the faculty members, it is a lot easier. Of course they have to do a lot of work. For one thing, they cannot make mistakes because it is going to be seen by 10,000 people. There has to be meticulous planning and so on. But nevertheless, I would say that administrative work is several times that. So I wanted to make a pitch for this because some people think that it is after all administrative work. So I wanted to put that on record. So I would like to introduce Dr. Mukta Atre, who is the coordinator of this. I think, well, let me just put it, I think she is a senior project manager. I do not know the exact designation, but she coordinates this activity. Well, sitting next to her is Sajjan, who handles all our recording and he is also an IT specialist. And if our IT team does not respond to him, does not reply to his email, he will roll down his sleeves and actually develop the whole thing. He is capable of doing that. And then he has done streaming, he has done all kinds of things. I would like to also introduce our finance and accounts minister as Professor Fartex says, Mrs. Jaya Geithande. And then I would like to introduce Rajesh, who is the hardware person for Akash. Some of you might have seen him in the Akash course. I would like to introduce Mahindra, who is sitting just behind Rajesh. I am not sure whether I will remember all the phases. There are lots of people, as you can see, there are, I think, if I am not mistaken, at least 150 people who work in Professor Fartex project. So that reminds me, I have talked a lot, Professor Fartex will talk next and I am pretty sure that he will talk about MOOCs and so as a result I will not say anything about it. So I wish you all the best, it's a great opportunity. I want all the participants to make use of this opportunity, this golden opportunity and participate more than anything else. Please do ask questions and challenge our instructors and do that live and also through Moodle and then do share your exam papers, do share your assignments and so on. Thanks for joining. Goodbye and Jai Hind. Thank you, Professor Madhugalya. Our co-PI, Professor Fartex could not join us today, but he did not want to lose this opportunity of talking to you all, so he has very kindly recorded a few words for all of us and I will now play that. Greetings from IIT Bombay. I must apologize for not being physically present to interact with you, but I am happy that the recording technology permits me to share some of my thoughts with you. First and foremost, let us talk about the clicker application which all of you are going to test. We have long ago realized that the clicker application could be very useful for the teachers to get immediate feedback from their students. Many teachers in IIT Bombay have already been using this to conduct even two, three quizzes every day in their class. What we would like is to see teachers from all the 300 colleges which are Akash project centers to be doing exactly the same thing. For this reason, our team has prepared a version of the application which can be run locally. What it means is you do not require any internet connection, you do not require to be connected to the central model or central database, you can set up everything in your own college and run the clicker application for any class. You will recall that we had suggested that every college should try and teach at least one course using Akash tablets. You may try this out in this semester and you may therefore use the clicker application in your own classes. Please note that the infrastructure in the classroom that you should provide should be checked very thoroughly, particularly for the Wi-Fi connectivity and also the students participating in the class should be told to charge their batteries of Akash tablets well before they come to the class. We all understand that the battery does not last very long. Incidentally, this is something which will be corrected in the future versions of Akash. You must have read the news that with the success of the Akash project and thanks to help and assistance from all of you, the government has decided to go ahead with the next versions of Akash tablet. The specs for the next version have already been frozen. DGS&D will be floating at tender to possibly get 50 lakh or 1 kcal tablets in the near future for further expansion. I would also like to touch upon one point where many of the teachers who are assembled here would be concerned with. I have received some mails recently and this relates to the Akash Research Fellowship Award contest which I had announced for the participants of our Akash orientation program. I will frankly share with you some of my problems till March or April. It was not very clear whether we will be receiving all the 1 lakh tablets that we had ordered and therefore it was necessary for me to preserve the funding available to make alternate arrangements if necessary. However, thanks to DataVend, they supplied all the 1 lakh tablets and we have distributed them to all the centers. This happened in the month of April and May. Subsequently, there was a long gap of summer vacation and thereafter there was some delay on my part. I would like to assure all participating teachers that the Akash Research Fellowship Award contest is very much on. However, I would like to mention that our Peruzal and evaluation of the submissions indicates that many submissions are not up to the mark. Instead of depending upon the evaluation done at a center place, I have therefore decided to fall back to the peer evaluation system which I had in fact briefly suggested in the original contest. Accordingly, these submissions will now be evaluated at each remote centers by the peer groups formed by the team leaders of all the submitters. In about a week's time, I will be informing you the details of this peer evaluation process. We hope to complete this process within one month and announce the awards by end of September. I am also going to conduct a meeting through a view of all remote center coordinators as also all Akash coordinators. Tentatively, we have frozen the dates to be 31st of August for remote center coordinators and 7th of September for Akash coordinators. These are Saturdays. These will be short meetings for about three hours and they will be conducted through a view that means you don't have to travel anywhere but you have to be present and participate. Then I will be issuing the notification very shortly. I do not want to take more time. It is important that you understand all the details and integrities of how the setup has to be done and how the quizzes are to be conducted using Akash tablets in your own classrooms by your own teachers. My team has worked well but as you know in all such applications, there is always a possibility of further improvement both in functionality and in effectiveness. Please do use the tablets for this purpose. The people who have used it here, my own colleagues have given valuable feedback using which we have been able to make several improvements. I am sure that with your further inputs, we will continue to enhance the effectiveness of this application. Thank you very much. All the best. So, that brings us to an end of the inaugural session.


As-salamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh, Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim, Prime Minister Shahru Salvi, Tabi Masmus, Prime Minister of Manuwatu, Mr. Chairman, Secretary General Olin Jauh, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon to all of you. First of all, I would like to take the opportunity in cordially thank the International Community Communication Union for inviting me to attend this preliminary Potentially Conference 18. It's a true pleasure and honor to be here on behalf of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan at such an important event. Please allow me to begin by thanking His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister of UEE, and Ruler of Dubai, and the Government of United Arab Emirates for hosting this important conference and for their kind hospitality. Distinguished delegates, the development in the field of ICT has revolutionized every aspect of human being and the way people communicate or share information in the society now. The ICT usage has now been extended to almost all areas of the society through the consistent efforts of the Government as well as generous assistance and support provided by the ICT stakeholders, especially ITU. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, I would like to thank you, Mr. Secretary General, especially for your visit to Afghanistan and your contributions in this field. It's worth mentioning that Internet is gaining rapid popularity in the mobile usage as reached an extraordinary level, recognizing the growing demand for reliable and affordable Internet connectivity in the region. As a minor contribution in this region, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has embarked on a number of noteworthy achievements, including approval of open access policy by the Government, which will further support the private sector to invest in fiber optics, which will result in a strong competition amongst operators in terms of service quality and tariffs. Digital CASA project, connecting Afghanistan to China, Central Asia, and Europe through fiber optics. The Government of Afghanistan has extended the fiber optic networks with a total length of 4,500 kilometers to 25 provinces, which enables 90 percent of Afghans to benefit from the telecommunication services. Afghanistan fiber optic is connected to five neighboring countries, including Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Six GSM operators in one landline operator providing broadband service throughout the country. Until last June, the total number of GSM active subscribers in the country has exceeded 20.3 million. The number of internet subscribers has reached 9.7 million, which is a considerable achievement in the last decade. To date, nearly a total amount of 2.3 billion US dollars have been invested in ICT development areas. It's great news for our community that 130 TVs and 310 FM radio are broadcasting throughout the country. While in the year 2001, we had only one TV channel and one radio operator in the country. As a member of the ITU, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan fully endorses the visions, goals, and targets of UN SDGs. And we commit that in light of SDGs, we could provide standard ICT services and paved the way for private sector to invest in the field of ICT in the country. And once again, I would like to thank the UAE authorities for the generous hosting of the ITU, for organizing such a valuable event.  Thank you. Wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.


The title of my talk is the case for free trade. I'm going to address some of the arguments for free trade and some of the arguments for protectionism, tariffs, and I only have 45 minutes, so I kind of have to not tackle all of the thorny issues here, but I'll try to provide you with a foundation for thinking about these arguments. I'll try to provide you with a framework for thinking about the arguments for free trade and protectionism. It's my position that the Austrians need to spend more time on these issues. There's not a whole lot about this in human action or man economy and state. There are books that are Austrian-ish on this issue, and I'll mention a couple of them while I'm talking today. We start with the fact that by now you have a firm grasp on the argument that in an unhampered market economy, resources tend to be allocated towards consumers most urgent wants because entrepreneurs have a profit incentive to do just that. The unhampered market economy is economically preferable to interventionism. That argument does not directly counter the arguments for tariffs. And the reason is tariffs hamper the world economy. They don't necessarily, the arguments for an unhampered economy do not apply to tariffs because tariffs hamper the world economy. So we're talking about the domestic economy. Both sides of the debate are concerned with the domestic economy, not the world economy. And Mises makes this point. In human action, Mises says that liberals believe that peaceful international cooperation is a more appropriate means than conflict for attainment of the end, which they and the nationalists are both aiming at, their own nation's welfare. They do not, as the nationalists charge, advocate peace and free trade in order to betray their own nation's interests to those of foreigners. On the contrary, they consider peace and free trade the best means to make their own nation wealthy. What separates the free traders from the nationalists is not ends, but the means recommended for attainment of the ends common to both. So both sides of the debate are generally talking about the domestic economy. All right, the next point is, consider the following question. Could the government intervene in the economy in a manner that enriched Alabama at the expense of other parts of the economy? And undoubtedly they could. We agree on this, we write about these things. And could they use the tariff to harm, to exploit regions of the economy and benefit other regions of the economy? Yes, they could. And they did exactly that throughout the 1800s. They used the tariff, the North used the tariff to enrich the Northern business interests and exploit the South. I'll just cite Tom DeLorenzo's real Lincoln on this, where a Northern newspaper editor admits exactly that. The Daily Chicago Times candidly admitted that the tariff was indeed a tool used by Northerners for the purpose of plundering the South. The editor of the newspaper warned that the benefits of this political plunder would be threatened by the existence of free trade in the South. You can use the tariff to transfer wealth from the South to the North. So we have to ask ourselves, why can't they use the tariff to transfer wealth from Asia to the US? That's the argument for tariffs, right? The argument for tariffs is not that it doesn't hurt the world economy, it's that the benefits of the tariff outweigh any damage to our domestic economy. So we're almost giving in to them because we admit they can use the tariff to transfer wealth from one region to another. All right. I already sense skepticism here. All right, well, we start off always with the argument that there's gains from trade. Dr. Rittenauer has covered this completely, so I don't have to say very much about this, but I'll make a few comments. When Dr. Rittenauer talked about the division of labor earlier this week, did a great job. Of course, there are benefits from trade. Mises recognizes this in many places. I'll cite one such article, Autarchy the Road to Misery. Mises argues that the division of labor is the foundation of European culture here. It's an older article, but this doesn't have anything to do with tariffs. This just, Mises is just arguing that trade is better than not trading. And the basis of this argument is usually we start with Adam Smith here, where Smith argued among many other things regarding a trade. He argued that the division of labor leads to specialization, and in that specialization, we're more productive. If I spend lots of time doing something, I just become better at it. You know, if I, well, the example's about, you know, if I work on my own cards, but I'm not a very good mechanic, but if I was spent 40 hours a week being a mechanic, I would just, I'd become very good at it. Smith says, the division of labor, however, so far as it could be introduced, occasions in every art, in every art, a proportionate increase of the productive powers of labor, making this point. And then he goes on to start to build the case for free trade by spending several pages on the extent of the market. And if there's a greater extent to the market, then there's greater gains from trade. So if we trade within the United States, the division of labor occurs, and there's gains from trade, if we also trade with Europeans and Asians, there's a greater extent of the market, and there's greater gains from trade. Most people, or many people, I don't know if most, many people when they make the case for free trade, so based their argument on Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage in his 1817 book, there's some debate if this is actually Ricardo's work, but for today's purposes, we don't need to concern ourselves with that. And Ricardo points out or makes the case that nations concentrate on producing the goods in which they're a low opportunity cost producer, and they import the goods in which they're a high opportunity cost producer that they'll benefit. And both parties that do this, both parties to the trade will benefit from this type of trade. This is a foundational argument in economics. Paul Samuelson, when he was asked to cite something in the social sciences, cite a conclusion that was true and non-trivial, said the law of comparative advantage. Another Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman. I apologize to Tom Woods for approvingly citing Paul Krugman. Says if there were an economist creed, it would surely contain the affirmation. I understand the principle of comparative advantage. Krugman also says part of our creed is I advocate for free trade. All right, I know that Dr. Wittner covered all of this with Harpo and Chico trading beef and mangoes, but let's look at briefly at Ricardo's numbers. They're often called Ricardo's magic numbers. If you Google this, all sorts of articles will pop up. But Ricardo's numbers are that he's talking about England and Portugal. England can produce a given amount of cloth. Using the labor of 100 men and can produce a certain amount of wine with the labor of 120 men. Portugal requires the labor of 90 men to produce that same amount of cloth and only 80 men to produce wine. Portugal uses, it's just a single input model. There's only labor. He's only concerned with the labor theory of value here. Portugal, in a sense, in the absolute sense is better at producing either product requires less labor to produce wine and less labor to produce cloth. But if we think in terms of comparative advantage, Portugal has a comparative advantage in the production of wine and would benefit by specializing in the production of wine and importing cloth from England, both countries would benefit. Gottfried Hobbler, who is Austrianish, I guess, at some point, anyway, he has a great book. It's Must Reading for Austrians, I think, interested in this topic. His 1936 book, The Theory of International Trade. Rothbard's copy of this book is, most of the book is underlined, page after page, every line being underlined. But Rothbler developed our modern formulation of this law in terms of real opportunity costs, instead of the labor theory of value. So every once in a while, in international economics, you'll see the word Austrian, and they'll be referring to Hobbler's formulation of the law of comparative advantage. Hobbler is, I'm gonna go off track, I think. Hobbler is a somewhat Austrian. In the book, Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays, he writes one of the essays. But then by 1974, in his 1974 book, he sounds Keynesian. And there's a bit of Keynesianism in his 1936 international trade book. All right, this is the way we usually explain it at the principles level, something like this. Let's see here. No, you can't see that. Let's try this one. That's a little better. So here we have England's production possibilities curve for wine and cloth. If England produces wine and cloth efficiently, they'll end up with some combination of wine and cloth, say at point A. If they specialize in the production of cloth and trade, export some cloth and import some wine, they'll end up on this consumption possibilities curve, this red line, they'll end up with more wine and cloth than they could have had if they don't trade with Portugal. England doesn't have to have more capital. They don't need to be smarter. They don't need to work harder. Just by simply trading with Portugal, they end up with a higher standard of living. But these arguments do not tell us that these arguments by themselves do not tell us that free trade is good. So far we've just said trading is better than not trading. Free trade, trade is better than autarky. That's all we've said so far. And people like Hobbler and the other book that his must reading for Austrians is by Leland Yeager and David Turk in 1976. They have a great book on this. And both of them, they don't stop with Ricardo and Smith. That does not end the debate over free trade. You have to, I'll show you today. It's more complicated than that. But we can use this argument to make a case for free trade. We can use Ricardo's argument to make a case, a case for free trade if we make certain assumptions. So suppose we assume the terms of trade are favorable for both countries. The red line that I'll show you is favorable for both countries. Ricardo just asserts that it will be. He doesn't explain with any economics why that would occur. He just makes that assertion. And as far as I know, no one's explained it in terms of Austrian price theory. It's an open avenue for investigation here. But for today's purposes, let's assume the terms of trade are favorable for both countries. Let's assume that the tariff does not affect the terms of trade, a false assumption in some cases. Let's assume that trade is balanced. So within Ricardo's formulation, if you have a massive trade surplus, you may be worse off trading than not trading. So Ricardo gets around this by talking about gold flows. He said trade will be balanced because if you have a massive trade surplus and you're exporting lots of goods and not importing very much, gold will flow into the country, your prices will go up and eventually trade will more or less balance. So eventually you'll have gains from trade because of gold flows. But that argument doesn't apply today. There's no gold flowing in and out of the country. We also assume that capital and labor are perfectly mobile within a country. There's no pain in labor markets as workers move from one industry to another. Austrians are sort of middle of the rotors on this issue. So we don't think labor markets are perfect, but we're not Keynesian on this issue. We don't think there's a terrible lot of friction. And importantly, we have to assume that capital and labor do not cross international borders and other false assumption here. Of course, those things happen today. All right, this is sort of how we explain it using the principle of comparative advantage. So here we have the red line shows the consumption possibilities curve. If there's free trade, England ends up at point C here with this combination of wine and cloth. If they protect their wine industry, they produce at point B prime. They produce less cloth and more wine. They trade up along this blue consumption possibilities curve. The lines are parallel indicating the terms of trade are the same regardless of whether or not there's a tariff. And so they end up on a lower consumption possibilities curve, say at point C prime. So some trade with the tariff is preferable to no trade economically, but free trade is preferable to the tariff. All right, some of the arguments for tariffs are so weak. And these are oftentimes the arguments you hear the most. We can just stop here and demolish those arguments more or less. So let's do that. Krugman calls this a playing dirty. He says that your opponents, the protectionists often engage in errors of logic and fact. And he says you can demolish them. And he says Krugman says, this is playing dirty and I advocate it strongly. All right, so we have this common argument that tariffs lead to more jobs. It increases our employment. If we protect the steel industry, we have more jobs in this country. In the steel industry, if we have a tariff on sugar and have high sugar prices, we grow a lot more sugar beets in this country, even though it's a terribly inefficient way to get sugar. And it's true that the tariff does lead to more jobs in the protected industries. But we can easily, I think, counter this argument. If you create jobs in one industry, you lose jobs in another industry. If you protect the English wine industry, jobs are created, but where do those workers and where does that capital come from? It comes from the cloth industry. So you lose jobs in the cloth industry. And Paul Krugman, I'm citing the Krugman stuff before 2000. So in the last 20 years, Krugman is arguing with early Krugman on lots of issues here. But anyway, when discussing this particular argument, Krugman says, constant employment is a reasonable approximation. So he's saying labor markets more or less adjust. Even if it's not painless, the adjustment occurs and we shouldn't buy into this argument. Hobbler, by the way, sort of in 1936, sort of there's the inklings that he's buying into this. He's talking about the friction in the labor market. And in Murray Rothbard's copy of the book, that's all underlined and in big letters in the margin, it says, aha, exclamation mark. I don't know, did he catch Hobbler? I don't know why it says that. And then by 1950, Hobbler writes an article or writes and builds a formal model showing that in the face of the frictions in the labor market, a tariff might be preferable to free trade. At least he can model it. All right. And then there's a series of arguments that basically say either imports are bad or low-priced imports are bad. We can sort of lump all of these arguments together. There's arguments, a series of arguments saying that low-priced imports hurt us either because the low-priced imports are either due to cheap foreign labor. So because wages are low in other countries, they sell us low-priced imports. Our workers have trouble competing with this labor, so goes the argument. And they will have to lower their, accept lower wages to be competitive, ignoring the fact that wages are largely determined by the amount of capital per worker, ignoring this Austrian position. And then sometimes the low-import prices are just due to firms dumping their products at our markets in order to gain market share. So either way, the argument is low-priced imports hurt our businesses and our workers, and we need to protect ourselves from these low-priced imports, say, with a tariff or some other trade restriction. But within the law of comparative advantage, low-priced imports are good. It's a, they lead to a better terms of trade. If Portugal would sell England lower-priced wine, England wouldn't have to export as much of its cloth. It could import more wine. It would end up with more wine and cloth. So we can use Ricardo's principle here to counter this argument. I'll show you a diagram on this in a moment. But the other, another argument that's really sort of in the same category is the argument that we need to protect ourselves from a trade deficit, that the trade deficit is bad, that the benefits of trade are due to the exports, not the imports. So this is an old mercantilist position that Adam Smith demolished and we've demolished it several times over by this point. So, but this is easily countered. Really the benefits of trade are not due to the exporting. It's due to the import. By the way, if you wanna read about this, you might start with Henry Haslitz, the driver exports where he's demolishing this argument in his book, Economics of One Lesson, In One Lesson. But just ask yourselves, if we export wheat to Europe and they send us Italian sports cars, do we benefit from watching them eating their our wheat or do we benefit from sporting around in sports cars? And of course the benefits come as we get to have the sports cars. The benefits come from the imports. It would be even better if we just got to keep our own wheat and eat it. They would just send us free sports cars. And we can show this using this comparative advantage diagram here. So here the red line is the initial terms of trade. This red consumption possibilities curve. So England's specializing at point B. They're specializing in the production of cloth and they end up at point C. But if there's lower priced imports, England does not have, I mean they can import, they can export less cloth, import more wine, and the blue line represents the improved terms of trade. So we're better off with low priced imports than we are with higher priced imports. And if there's a trade deficit, that means you're not exporting as much and you're importing a lot and still you end up better off than before. And there's the additional benefit of a trade deficit is that if you have a trade deficit, then dollars have flowed out of the country and those dollars tend to flow back into the country in the terms of some type of foreign investment. Foreigners, the capital flows into the country. So you get the double benefit of having a trade deficit. All right, but there are stronger arguments for tariffs. Or at least I'm calling them stronger arguments. There are arguments within the international economic sphere that are considered to be the better arguments for tariffs. These are not the arguments I've addressed so far. And there's a lot of them. And the reason they are stronger arguments for tariffs is they admit they're against some trade. They're just arguing that the benefits of the tariff outweigh any losses due to the tariff. So you could buy into Ricardo's argument and still make the case for a tariff. And that's what they do. And you can't invoke Ricardo and refute these arguments. So in that sense, they are stronger arguments. All right. One of them is the infant industries argument. This argument goes back, I think it was first made in 1645. So it goes back, what is that, 375 years. So it's actually a very complicated issue and I can't fully address it today. But the argument is, yes, Ricardo's right. Free trade is wonderful. We just have to protect industries until they're ready to face international competition. So within this argument, industries are born somehow. That's not quite explained. And then there's an infancy period where they need protection and who could be opposed to protecting infants? Aren't we all in favor of this? And then somehow the industry matures. There's very little economics in this explanation, by the way, and then you can have free trade and all the wonders and glories of the benefits of free trade. You just have to protect the industry until it's ready for competitive pressures. All right. There's a lot of issues here. I'll just address a couple of them. One of them is the lack of sophisticated economic analysis in this argument. It's more of a biological explanation, an analogy of what's going on. So protected industries never mature. And the reason is there's no explanation for how the industry arises. There's no entrepreneur making an investment decision, expecting the present value of the future stream of profits to be positive or anything. Somehow the industry just arises. So there's no entrepreneur in this. There's no price, there are very little price theory or anything in this explanation. So industries never mature. And that's because entrepreneurs make different decisions if they're being protected from international competition, then they would if they're facing international pressure. So if you're a protected industry, the entrepreneurs in that industry build businesses that have characteristics A, B, and C because they're not facing international competition. But if you're facing international competition, you build different businesses with different characteristics. So you're never ready for free trade because you have not built businesses. Investors have not built businesses that are ready to compete. So there's no, I can't find any example where an industry said, yes, we're ready. Please, we don't need protection anymore. We're so healthy and strong. Let's have some free trade. It's just, of course they don't. I think the main issue is that there's the lack of any entrepreneur in this theory. So the infant industries people, they don't want to protect all industries. They want to protect industries that are beneficial over the life of the industry. Well, aren't those the industries entrepreneurs will fund? Entrepreneurs are willing to take losses upfront. They do it all the time in order to make profits over the life of their investment. Entrepreneurs will fund the correct industries. The industries that we want to be born and we want them to survive are the industries that don't need protection because entrepreneurs will fund those industries. Murray Rothbard makes this point. Mises also demolishes this argument, this infant industries argument. Rothbard says, in fact, if long run prospects in the new industry are so promising, why does not private enterprise ever run a lookout for a profitable investment opportunity? Enter the new field. So if it's such a great deal in the long run, of course, private investment will take care of this. We don't need protection. It's only because entrepreneurs realize that such investment would be uneconomic, i.e. it would waste capital, land and labor that it could otherwise be invested to satisfy more urgent desires of the consumers. So if you're protecting industries that investors won't fund, then you're wasting land, labor and capital. All right, another argument. I'll get to a couple more. Another argument, and this argument, oh, let me point out that within this infant industry's argument, I'm assuming the capital is coming from domestic sources. So I mean, if you fund the wine industry through protection, then it comes from English capital. Portugal is not building wine factories in England, right? It's important to make that distinction. All right, another argument is the terms of trade argument. It's called the optimal tariff argument. This argument began soon after Ricardo's book. By 1824, Robert Torrens is starting to make this argument, although he doesn't really spell it out until the 1840s. And this argument raged throughout the 1800s. So here's the argument. See, with the principle of comparative advantage, we're assuming the tariff will not affect the terms of trade. But if you're a large country when you buy a lot of international goods, the tariff could affect the terms of trade. So if you put a tariff on a product, the decreased demand internationally for that product falls, the price falls, and you have a better terms of trade. So far, the argument is this is, yeah, that's, that could happen. I mean, that's a possibility. And then, so the terms of trade people say, well, if the benefits of the increased terms of the improved terms of trade exceed any damage due to inefficiency losses due to the tariff, then you're better off with the tariff. All right, so here's the way we would explain it using Ricardo's formulation. So the red line indicates the free trade consumption possibilities curve. You know, it indicates the terms of trade between England and Portugal. England protects their wine industry. Again, they produce at point B prime instead of point B. They produce some wine. They produce less cloth, but the blue line indicates the improved terms of trade. And in this example, the terms of trade have improved so much that England doesn't export very much cloth. They import lots and lots of wine and they end up at point C prime. A guy named Humphrey has the devastating article, the article that devastates the infant industry's argument. Excuse me. He makes a lot of points. His main point is that it's just really impossible to spot this type of situation for a government official. It's just impossible to spot the tariff that would make this happen. And if you did spot it, you would have the tariff that makes this happen now is different than the tariff rate you need in a month because everything keeps changing. You know, supply and demand keeps changing. Consumer preferences change. So one of his main points is that it's just impossible for government officials to implement this such a policy. There's a lot of other arguments here. All right. Here's the argument that I think is important that is addressed in the literature, but I think it's not addressed enough. It's an argument about capital flows and foreign investment. So Hobbler in 1936 talks about this a lot. Leland Yeager in 1976 talks about this a lot. It is addressed in the literature, but mainstream neoclassical economists tend to not pay attention to this very much. So here's the argument. The argument is that if we impose a tariff on a product, then foreign investors will fund that industry to some degree. So if we protect our car industry like we did, then all the foreign car companies built factories in the Southern States in South Carolina and Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee and Texas, right? So they funded the industry. Capital flowed into the country because of the protection. That's the argument that there are benefits from tariffs due to the foreign investment. And politicians, as they stumble around and talk about these things, sometimes sort of make this argument. So I think President Trump has made this argument, Obama, Bush, I think this is the argument that's being made in the political sphere. Back to Buchanan has been making this argument for a long time. In 2019, he wrote the article, Tariffs, The Taxes That Made America Great, where he made this exact argument that the reason we had so much foreign investment in the 1800s was due to the high tariffs. All right, let's make sure we understand the argument. So the first step of the argument is that if you protect an industry with a tariff, that'll increase foreign investment, capital flows to the protected industry. And that's assuredly happened. Hobbler says there's just lots and lots of examples of this. It's just, if you protect an industry, it's possible for foreigners to some degree fund that industry. All right, so that's step in the argument is irrefutable. Are there benefits from the foreign investment? Mises, time and time again, talks about the benefits of foreign investment in your economy. He just hammers this point to death. I could cite many articles, many places he talks about this. Certainly foreign investment increases your capital stock. You might look at, in 1958, he did a series of lectures in Argentina, one of them is titled, Foreign Investment. It's in the book, Economic Policy, Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. So the argument is that if the benefits from the capital accumulation exceed any damage done by the tariff, then you're better off with the tariff than you are without the tariff. The politicians that make this argument are discounting any damage to a tariff. They're only looking at the benefits. But you could make an argument saying if the benefits of the capital accumulation exceed any damage, then there are net benefits to having a tariff. See, the point here, the reason you can't use Ricardo here is Ricardo assumes the opportunity cost is domestic. So if you build up your wine industry, the opportunity cost is you have less cloth. But according to this argument, if you build up your wine industry, Portugal has a smaller wine industry. The opportunity cost is borne by the other country. This is why you can't use Ricardo to refute this. All right, there's a lot. This is a really thorny issue that I'm working on. One argument is that just because there is foreign investment in the protected industry, that does not imply necessarily that you get more capital overall. The economy is very complicated. The various industries are linked. And if you affect one industry, the effects ripple out through the economy. I ask you to remember Dr. Newman's Ham sandwich diagram. Where a simple ham sandwich, to construct a simple ham sandwich requires this massive structure of production throughout the economy. And if you change one part of it, it could change lots of industries. Haveler spends a lot of time on this in his book. So if one industry expands, other industries throughout the economy will expand and contract. And so for every industry that expands, that's an opportunity for foreign investment. And for every industry that contracts, that means we produce less of that product. That means foreigners produce more of that product. So that's an opportunity for our investors to invest overseas. So just because capital flows into one industry does not mean you get a net capital increase because capital will flow outside the country in other industries. So Haveler works through this analysis in detail. And then he says it's unlikely you get more capital. He doesn't say it's impossible. He just says it's unlikely. I think a really good argument is that tariffs are not the main determinant of foreign investment. When Mises talks about this, he's not talking about the tariff. He's talking about other institutions that encourage foreign investment time and time again. So foreign investment is largely determined by just the overall health of your economy. Foreign investors want to invest in a healthy economy. It's determined by other governmental policies, tax policies, our property rights being enforced. Is my investment going to be nationalized after a while? There's a lot of issues here. And tariffs are a small part of the decision regarding international capital flows. So just because you have a tariff, that doesn't mean you're going to suddenly have massive flows of foreign investment. Mises, by the way, in the middle of one of his discussions of capital he just throws out the line that a tariff cannot increase capital stock. But there's no explanation. I would like to accept the statement, but he doesn't explain why it can't. He just asserts it. All right, so these are some of the stronger arguments for tariffs and there are other strong arguments for tariffs that I don't have time to talk about. But we can sort of build a case against all of the arguments. And all of the arguments for tariffs generally make false assumptions and we can use this. So they're, they abstract from the real world. So one of the arguments that they almost always make when the economists build a model regarding tariffs and they say, look, a tariff might be beneficial. They always, there's always the statement in there that foreign governments are passive. And that means no retaliation. So even if you could imagine a situation where a tariff was welfare enhancing, other governments are likely to retaliate and eliminate any gains here. So the pro-tariff side just assumes this possibility away. But of course this will happen. Also, they always assume away any public choice issues. They always assume that government officials try to act in the national interest and they won't bow to political pressures. They won't cater to special interests like I talked about a couple of days ago. Paul Krugman, when talking about tariffs makes this point. Krugman used to be sort of a cautious free trader more or less, even though he wins the Nobel Prize for writing building models in favor of tariffs. But then at the end, he goes, it's pretty hard to do this in the real world. And one of the reasons he says this, he says governments do not necessarily act in the national interest. Do not necessarily act in the national interest. Do they ever act in the national interest? Especially when making detailed microeconomic interventions. Instead, they are influenced by interest group pressure. Well, of course they are. What if there was a world where other governments didn't retaliate and government officials were angelic beings resisting political pressures? Couldn't they then impose a tariff that was welfare enhancing? No. So this is similar, I think, to the calculation argument for the impossibility of socialism. It's just impossible to do this because it's just too complicated. It's impossible to identify the tariff rate that would be welfare enhancing. There's too many moving parts in the economy and things keep changing. I mean, you would have to just continually adjust the tariff. It's just, it's an impossible situation. It's like trying to allocate resources in the absence of market prices for the resources. Just like that's impossible. This is also impossible. Or like Dr. Terrell talked about regarding externalities. It's impossible to know the optimal amount of pollution or something. The information is not there. Even the entrepreneurs making the decisions, they don't know what the future holds regarding capital flows and things. All right, it's impossible for government officials to determine a protectionist policy. Free trade is implementable. You can have free trade. You can just say we have free trade. You can't have welfare enhancing protectionist policies. And Yeager, the other book you should read is by Yeager and Turk, if you're interested in this. They're not talking about capital flows. They're just making the general case for free trade here. And they say the protectionist slogan that free trade may be right in theory. This is a slogan you hear. Free trade's right in theory, but wrong in practice. Becomes more sensible when the word protectionism replaces free trade. Free trade is a meaningful, specific, discussable policy proposal. Ideal protectionism is not. That's my case for free trade. Thank you.


of the Association of the United States Army is a time to tell the Army's story. Part of that story are the efforts under development to equip and resource the future force to fight and win in a complex world. Our warfighters must thrive in environments of uncertainty and danger. A constant goal is to provide today's soldier with the resources, equipment and technology they need to accomplish this. Our partners in industry are crucial in developing and fielding emerging technologies that are part of improving the future combat effectiveness of our force. These advanced technologies increase the range, lethality, survivability and sustainability of our soldiers. Unmanned operational capabilities, improvements in communication technology and development of lighter and stronger protective gear are all innovations that provide the best resources for the Army of tomorrow. As the Army continues to develop leaders who are more adaptive and agile it's critical they are equipped in order to defeat our enemies. And even with the best resources in the hands of our soldiers what will continue to give us the advantage over our enemies is integrating the best resources with skilled soldiers and well-trained teams.


The Cart Creek incident was one of several incidents between 1976 and 1979 that led to the issuance of fire resistant clothing and the requirement for all firefighters to carry a fire shelter. But the lessons learned from this incident go far beyond that. We continue to run into trouble when our predicted fire behavior doesn't match up with the actual fire behavior. This last season, 65 firefighters on 22 different incidents were either entrapped or burned over. During these incidents, 19 fire shelters were deployed and they resulted in 7 of the 24 fatalities we suffered. Minimizing the difference between our predicted fire behavior and what actually occurs is everyone's responsibility. And the only way to do this is by being diligent students of fire and constantly evaluating our predictive abilities given the conditions we're faced with. Experience can be excellent training, but only if we look at every scenario as a potential training opportunity and continuously fine tune our fire behavior prediction skills. Additional information on the Cart Creek fire can now be found on the leadership website in the Staff Ride Library. Now before we close this module, we need to talk about some other hazards we face. When we think about wildland firefighting, most people see the fire itself as the most direct threat. However, when we look at the statistics, we realize that most injuries and fatalities occur not during suppression action, but during the mundane operations of travel, transport, and mopping up. In 2006, there were three devastating aircraft accidents that claimed the lives of eight firefighters. There was also 20 accidents involving vehicles or heavy equipment, including 14 rollovers. A listing of last year's statistics is included in your student workbook, along with a short write-up on driving safety. The importance of safe driving practices cannot be overstated. Before we conclude this module, let's listen to the mother of a victim of a fatal engine accident. Talk about listening to our inner voice and heightening our sense of awareness. I know she had that inner voice that day. I know she did.  I'm not comfortable with this. There's something wrong. She was talking about driving on that particular road. It was very hard, because it was so narrow, and she did. I know she did. I don't know what she did about it other than to talk to Sean, but she did go out on that next night shift. And even though her captain, who was sitting next to her, said, this is going to be our last pass, this is too dangerous, that was their last pass. They didn't make it back. They were listening, but didn't act soon enough. And all of those things that were, all those little things that were wrong, that weren't quite right, lined up. And she got a little too close to the edge of the road. That gave way, and they tumbled down.  I wish with all my heart she'd listened harder, sooner. There's always hope that young men and women will really try to be aware all the time, and not be afraid, and not second-guess themselves when they think something's wrong.  We need to talk to you for a minute. You know what they're going to say. You know what it is. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I don't want that to ever happen again. I don't want another family to ever have to go through what my family went through, ever again. If you're injured, or God forbid, if there's a fatality on a fire, everyone suffers. The co-workers suffer. The people in the community, where the incident happened, suffers. Families suffer. What we've been through following Heather's death, I wouldn't wish him a worst enemy. It's every parent's nightmare. It's out of order. Children should not die first. You should not be bearing a child. And it will never go away. The memories, the thoughts are always with us. When I always feel Heather's spirit around me, she's in the faces of all the firefighters I see, and it will never go away. It gets better. It gets easier. My husband is very fond of saying, even a guy with one arm learns to shave with the other one, but it's never far from my thoughts. I wake up in the morning, and I might think, well, I have this appointment today, and I've got to get ready for work, and I have to do this, and I have to do that, and oh, Heather, good morning, sweetie. I hope it's good for you in heaven today. It's always there. It'll never go away. The horror of it is dimmed. The impact of it is no longer like someone is ripping my heart out, but it's there. And until the day I die, I'm going to miss her. It's our hope that the review of the Cart Creek Fire and last year's accident statistics will serve as a reminder to us all that we need to prepare both mentally and physically for this upcoming fire season. Remember to expect the unexpected, maintain situational awareness, and keep thinking safety first.