John Rendel

What does she think the problem is here? Because those kids will almost certainly make more progress than non-EAL kids, and definitely more than non-EAL kids outside London.

Schools in London SMASH this! She should be celebrating that they do.

But that wouldn’t tell the story she wants to tell.

… are in hock to the baby boom voter block. So most millennials and Gen Z don’t enter politics (or don’t progress to the top) unless they are either ideologically aligned with baby boomers or hardened, pragmatic careerists.

The same thing has happened in the US.
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A linked theory is that FPTP combined with an aging population has created a system in which the vast majority of 20/30somethings with any interest in politics have been trapped. If they wanted to get any power at all, they faced the choice of joining Labour or the Tories both of which 1/2

Calling all UK Education Executives! We've just launched the search for an ambitious new CEO at Palladian Academy Trust.

Calling all UK Education Executives! We've just launched the search for an ambitious new CEO at Palladian Academy Trust.

And your economy

Particularly re the role of external actors in development including philanthropy. The key insight I’m working on is that the questions around ‘how, with whom and where’ we act should override the ‘what’. If the ‘what’ comes first, you can’t get the how right.

My pleasure. Your writing has really helped mine and helped me develop some ideas for what to work on next.

I signed up for Ken’s Substack a couple of weeks ago and for anyone interested in Africa (past, present or future) it is an absolute goldmine of thoughtful analysis and prescriptions for action. Economics, aid, political economy, history. It’s all in there and more. Hard-headed but not hard hearted.

I used to, those were the days.

This is the social engineering the right wing get upset about right?

The big issue in the U.K. is how we judge the class of other people (and subsequently discriminate) rather than how we might identify ourselves.

Coda: The bigger risk of course is not just that the proactive destruction of trust leaves us frustrated in terms of progress but that it also leads to the destruction of even the sub-optimal current state of affairs. This is already happening in the US, Czechia etc. and fast approaching everywhere

Until we’ve achieved that, our efforts to shift the dial will be frustrated at every turn.

To be fair to PM Starmer in the U.K., I think his instincts align with all this. But he needs as much support as he can get and he needs to avoid tribalism, as this goes far beyond the Labour Party.
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5. Our collective appetite for the preferred equilibrium is there (a majority would be better off for it) and we have the resources to achieve it. But we don’t achieve it, because we lack trust.
6. So the urgent question of our time, is how to counter those whose strategy is to destroy trust.
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4. So the losers’ strategy is to undermine our trust in one another and in government to reduce the chance that government helps coordinate society towards a preferred equilibrium (eg. one in which there’s no child poverty or in which rivers aren’t polluted).
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… (like underinvestment in reducing child poverty) to one where no child poverty exists. The resulting increase in human capital means the investment pays for itself
3. The only losers from such coordination are those whose income (at least short-term) depends on the sub-optimal status quo
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Here’s a general theory of ‘everything going wrong’:

1. Most of the remaining issues that exist in wealthy societies are caused by coordination failures.
2. The state and/or multi-lateral institutions are the only bodies that can move us from any specific, inadequate equilibrium … 1/n

On the contrary, the buttons are doing a great job in tough circumstances.

I also think she was on to something with the concept of ‘citizens of nowhere’. It offended me when she first said it but as an attack on privileged internationalism, it had more than a nub of truth.

The public debate system is a great example of crap Nash equilibrium generating sub-optimal outcomes for society. No individual actor can change it unilaterally (hence the equilibrium) and cooperative action to shift to a different equilibrium (eg. public owned social media) is almost impossible

Have you read the book: ‘Inadequate Equilibria’ by Eliezer Yudkowsky? It’s brilliant on how so many of the systems we have created produce incentives that make rational people do seemingly irrational things. In that situation, the only thing that moves the dial is structural change.

Is this true of the latest Lib Dems too or less so?

This is up there with the best of Sam’s blog.

Powerfully explanatory in terms of how Labour relates to white working class voters. And then, a practical guide on how to solve the apparent contradictions of the party, by focussing on areas of policy where non-zero sum gains can be made.

No, it doesn’t. I was just suggesting that were we to return to the question, the strength of the new arguments might drive renewed appetite for the debate as well as a different result at the end of it. I’m thinking it’s a ‘build it and they will come’ situation.

The arguments for Britain in Europe are 10x more powerful today than they were 10 years ago.

The state of the USA and the Russian threat being the main 2 and the third being the realisation that it’s made us poorer.

Stefan Dercon’s book about ‘elite bargains’ comes to mind. There’s some hope if enough power still resides in the parts of the US elite that feel they would do better out of constitutionalism than clientelism.

The two-child limit means that an additional 500,000 children are currently growing up in poverty. If current policies remained in place, we would expect one-in-three British children to be growing up in poverty by the end of the decade

immediate abolition would cost £3.5 billion per year and lift half a million children out of poverty by the end of the decade. How do less ambitious options measure up?

Other rumoured options would be less cost effective

and other options would risk creating new cliff edges.

Is there room for compromise on the two-child limit?

Entirely scrapping it would have the biggest impact on child poverty and be most cost-effective.

Wow

Ha! Yes, I really should have said that those calendars are beautiful before making that point though!