A quick hit-and-run before I go offline for a while --

The Home Office over here did a study of recidivists a couple of years back that discovered that besides the usual psychiatric cases (for whom a strong case can be made that secure psychiatric institutions rather than prison is the appropriate solution) about two-thirds of them were illiterate, innumerate, or both: often profoundly so, to the extent of being unable to read road signs. As part of the study, they then introduced remedial basic literacy and numeracy classes. The recidivism rate among the successful graduates of those classes dropped by about 70%. It was speculated that illiteracy and innumeracy are such huge barriers to successful participation in society today that a chunk of the recidivism was involuntary -- the subjects were drifting into crime because the usual social security/employment agency institutions simply weren't helping them because they couldn't fill out forms.

As you might imagine, this sparked renewed interest in prison study courses: it's a hell of a lot cheaper to add a crash-course in reading, writing and 'rithmetic to a first prison sentence than it is to lock someone up for years on a second and subsequent one.

Put this together with the neighbourhood/family paradigm for criminal activity, push it out into the community via social services and the local education authority, and with the right targeting it might be possible to do something to reduce the level of petty crime at source. (And no, I'm not suggesting abolition is possible; but a reduction by even 50% would make an immense difference to the perceived quality of life of the rest of the population, and doing it by relatively cheap means -- basically, by teaching their kids to read and write, which is cheap compared to the cost of keeping the adults in prison -- seems like a good idea.)

>besides the usual psychiatric cases (for whom a strong case can be made that secure psychiatric institutions rather than prison is the appropriate solution)

-- no dispute there.

>about two-thirds of them were illiterate, innumerate, or both: often profoundly so, to the extent of being unable to read road signs.

-- however, we already have a very large, very expensive literacy program; it's called universal compulsory schooling.

If someone manages to get through 10 years of that without learning to read and do basic arithmetic, the best guess is that they're either just profoundly stupid, or have some serious mental disability, or both.

The main problem with just increasing the availability of education of all sorts is that it procedes from the unexamined assumption that there's an almost infinite supply of people capable of benefiting from it.

This just isn't so.

In fact, in most Western countries the number attending post-secondary education is probably already higher than the percentage of the population capable of getting anything useful out of it. The liberal-arts and social-science faculties are full of the horrible results.

Hence the dumbing-down of the university curriculum, to the extent that universities have to spend a lot of time teaching what used to be taught in high school (or the British equivalents).

And of course that spreads down the educational pyramid, driven by the same reluctance to admit failure; telling people that their little Johnny is a dimwit who ought to be in a vocational course for toilet-swabbers isn't going to make you popular.

The presence at all levels of people who won't or more often simply can't learn sops up money and staff attention which could be used to teach those who can and will.

This is a gross waste of resources, just as much as denying education to those who _are_ capable of benefiting from it would be. We used to make that mistake; now we're doing the opposite.

This is not progress; it's just falling off the other side of the horse. And of course ometimes we manage to make both mistakes at once.

It leads to further absurdities; people who should be gathering winkles sitting at desks soaking up society's resources, while Chinese are smuggled in to gather winkles.

Time out for laughter and applause: many of those Chinese winkle-gatherers probably _would_ be able to benefit from more education, unlike the English dullards they're indirectly supporting. You find the same ludicrous situation in other developed countries too, of course.

>The recidivism rate among the successful graduates of those classes dropped by about 70%.

-- the "successful" graduates. There's the kicker. See above.

It's sometimes possible to pound a basic education into the heads of the severely resistant/limited, but it costs like blazes. A bright, willing child usually just soaks up basic literacy and numeracy, often on their own, but the others...

This wasn't a problem when most people were going to spend their lives topping turnips or the equivalent, but it sure is now.

Also, of course, criminals in jail tend to be disproportionately the _stupid_ criminals. If they were a bit smarter, they probably wouldn't have been caught -- or at least not as often.

The same thing happens with sociopaths. Stupid ones almost always end up in jail or dead.

Smart ones often function quite successfully. They're devoid of conscience but they can fake it, because they've figured out that they have to conform to the rules to some extent to survive.

They're even at an advantage in some professions, particularly ones that that reward the capacity for guilt-free physical aggression and lack of empathy.

The recidivism rate among the successful graduates of those classes dropped by about 70%.

-- the "successful" graduates. There's the kicker. See above.



This was a pilot project. The literacy course in question involved one teacher, about forty lessons, and took 'em as far as the "Janet and John" level ... we're not talking university degrees here.

Yes, this stuff should be handled in primary school. Trouble is, it isn't. The failing of the educational system in the small proportion of people who become illiterate recidivists warrants attention in its own right; what concerns me is that we ought to be using any tools that come to hand to turn criminals back into productive members of society, especially if the costs are low compared to continued incarceration.

You're dead right about sociopaths. Having -- in the past -- worked for managers who showed some or all of the salient traits, this rings lots of bells. Yes, the smart ones end up with MBAs and being promoted to senior management positions because they can exploit the corporate culture. This is one of the drawbacks of the role of limited liability companies within the capitalist system. How to redesign capitalism so it doesn't reward sociopathic behaviour is left as an exercise for the reader.

(Suffice to say, my gut feeling -- as a liberal -- is that if we don't do so, the system will ultimately discredit itself. After all, capitalism is supposed to be a tool for improving the well-being of the public; that's why we put up with it. If, instead, it turns into a rod to enable asocial psychopaths to terrorize the rest of us, it's not doing its job.)

"Yes, this stuff should be handled in primary school. Trouble is, it isn't."

-- well, it is for most people.

I'm not enamored of all aspects of modern pedagogy -- I'm a strong phonics advocate -- but it really doesn't take 10 or 12 or 14 years to teach a normal kid to read. If they haven't learned basic literacy and numeracy in that time, chances are that there's something wrong with the kid.

>what concerns me is that we ought to be using any tools that come to hand to turn criminals back into productive members of society, especially if the costs are low compared to continued incarceration.

-- well, no objection to trying. However, my gut feeling is that anyone who's committed more than one quasi-serious crime is a lost cause, on average if not in every single individual case. And prisons can be made self-supporting, or nearly.

SFnal reference: say we had some quick, cheap way of reprogramming individuals so that they could never commit a crime again, "Clockwork Orange" style. Should we?

I'd be inclined to stick with prisons and hangmen. They're less of an insult to human dignity.

Charlie: "This is one of the drawbacks of the role of limited liability companies within the capitalist system. How to redesign capitalism so it doesn't reward sociopathic behaviour is left as an exercise for the reader."

-- I don't see how you can design a competitive system based on greed for accumulation that doesn't reward people who are ruthlessly competitive and greedy.

You're not going to get to the top in business unless you want it very badly, unless it burns in your veins and you worship Mammon to the exclusion of all else.

If you don't -- even if you're simply bored by it, rather than repelled -- someone who does think that way will climb over your face on the way to the top. No matter how you set up the system, they'll find a way to game it.

The most you can do is establish clear (and minimal) sets of rules and punish those who break them.

Or to quote Adam Smith, we don't rely on the good nature of the baker and shoemaker for our bread and shoes, but on their self-interest.

Most of the first great captains of industry who pushed through the Industrial Revolution against the moral and material resistance of traditional society were face-stomping bastards, absolute swine, the sort who'd squeeze the last farthing out of an orphan lad and then nail his ears to the factory wall for falling asleep at the end of his 14-hour day.

If the "nice" people like Dickens (or even Disraeli) had been in charge, we'd all still be peasants tugging our forelocks to the squire, if we hadn't starved to death in a potato famine.

(Of course, if the nice guys had been totally without influence, we'd still be having our ears nailed to factory walls. That sort of thing happens quite often in China these days.)

One of the main reasons Britain had an industrial revolution was that after 1688 it was run by a ferociously selfish (though very cunning) group of great landowners. It had been the Stuarts who showed some crumbs of compassion for the unpropertied. The Whig grandees who came back with William of Orange had no such sentimental illusions.

In most of Europe, innovators were regarded as selfish monsters who stole men's livings -- sort of the way outsourcing to India is regarded by many today. The 'moral economy' trumped the market. Kings were fearful of anything that might unsettle the masses.

The people running England after the Glorious Revolution agreed with that analysis for the most part, but they just didn't care who got it in the neck so long as innovation rebounded to their own profit.

And so they used the machinery of the State to smash the Luddites, send people protesting enclosures in chains to the colonies, tear up the whole fabric of traditional society, "clear" the Highlands, and so forth.

(Adam Smith also remarked that it was impossible for three men in the same line of work to have a drink together without conspiring against the public.)

>After all, capitalism is supposed to be a tool for improving the well-being of the public; that's why we put up with it.

-- well, it does, doesn't it? We're richer and freer than ever, and getting more so, on the whole. We've found a way to harness the ruthless and sociopathic to the social good.

Otherwise they'd be launching coups and backing totalitarian parties. You can't get rid of the power-hungry; at best, you can domesticate them a little.

It's one of the drawbacks of meritocracy in general that it lets the most ambitious rise to the top more easily, so that all the people in positions of power are those who want it very badly.

Another is that it tends to drain all the bright people (or at least all the ones with any practical energy and ambition) into the upper social echelons, or at least into the professional classes and the intellectual professions.

The sort of person who would have been a Radical cobbler reading Tom Paine or a self-improving working-class savant back in the 18th or early 19th century goes to university now.

There he (or she) associates with (and eventually marries) the like-minded. The latter effect is visible in business, too. Once upon a time executives occasionally married secretaries. Nowadays they marry other executives.

And so, oddly enough, the logical end result of meritocracy and social mobility is a society of hereditary castes.

(Sorry, been away visiting relatives -- including two with cancer -- hence limited posting lately.)

Steve, one can address the meritocracy issue quite easily with a progressive inheritance tax. The objective being to tune the system so that the children of the "bright" class inherit enough to pay for as much education as they can eat, plus a starter home and enough cash to found a small start-up, but no more.

(You can also address the matter of competence in a feudal society the old Chinese way, by having a formalized hierarchy in which the children of a noble of a given rank are of the next rank down unless they do something to obtain promotion.)

Inheritance taxes bring their own problems, of course. Where land is valuable (e.g. the UK today) you'd end up putting every family farm in the country out of business within a generation if you don't add a loophole to cover it. Again, the administration of inheritance tax will likely lie in the hands of the very class that is most likely to benefit from abolishing it (thank you for the worked demonstration, George W. Bush). But if you consider a caste based society to be a bad thing, and if you're not averse to a little social engineering, inheritance taxes are the way to go.

(Says the man whose parents are 77 and 82 and who's already wondering about how to deal with this very issue on a personal level ...)

On Capitalism: let me nail my colours to the mast and say that I figure capitalism is like fire; it's a great servant but a terrible master. We need it as an engine of wealth creation, but regulating it is essential.

(I say this to the background of a corporate murder trial that's just collapsed, here in the UK, after five months in front of a jury, when the judge concluded there were no grounds for conviction of the specific directors on trial -- but there are still several dead people and several maimed people and a company that was skimping on railway track maintenance that it had been contracted to do, so badly that it caused a high speed passenger train to derail with lethal consequences.)

"On Capitalism: let me nail my colours to the mast and say that I figure capitalism is like fire; it's a great servant but a terrible master. We need it as an engine of wealth creation, but regulating it is essential."

-- some time ago, I saw a German businessman interviewed. He was asked why German business wasn't creating jobs. (And, in fact, there hasn't been a single net new job in Germany since the 80's).

He replied (roughly, from memory):

"That is a lie. We are creating millions of jobs. Jobs in China, jobs in India, jobs in Poland, jobs in Slovenia, jobs in Brazil, jobs in the United States. And when they make it worth our while, we'll create jobs here in Germany. Until they do, the working class can kiss my ass."

In other words, if you regulate too much they'll simply shrug and take their toys somewhere else. Capital is mobile; very highly-skilled management and professionals and technicians are mobile; the rest of us are stuck.

All those French people living in London haven't moved there for the weather, or the quaint farmhouses and vineyards, or for the food. Nor is it an accident that there are hundreds of thousands of European scientists and technicians working in the US.

>but there are still several dead people and several maimed people and a company that was skimping on railway track maintenance

-- over here, high-powered tort lawyers would descend on the company with contingency-fee lawsuits aimed at stripping the company to the bone like a school of piranha with a cow.

"Steve, one can address the meritocracy issue quite easily with a progressive inheritance tax."

-- even leaving aside the effect on incentives, or the way it would drive people to game the system and misallocate resources thereby(intra vivos transfers, anyone?), that would make things worse, not better.

Inheritance of property interacts with regression to the mean to reduce the average IQ of the upper classes, like any other system of hereditary privilege.

If every generation had to earn their way in, it would _increase_ the likelihood of hereditary castes.

The purer and 'fairer' the meritocracy, the worse this gets because it increases the tendency to segregate the intelligent and/or aggressive.

In fact, the more open and fair (and hence more competitive)it is, the higher the chance that _everyone_ at the top will be a complete bastard, too.

(Actually I expect genetic engineering to correct the problem in the next couple of generations, so it'll be moot. Everyone will be brilliant and hard-charging.)

>Again, the administration of inheritance tax will likely lie in the hands of the very class that is most likely to benefit from abolishing it

-- this points out the other great weakness of schemes of regulation.

People always game the system, and they (being many, smart, and highly motivated) will always be able to do so to a degree which pretty well completely frustrates the ambitions of the system's designers.

The same people who'd get to the top in any other competitive endeavor end up running the regulatory apparatus, or bribing it, or both.

And the regulators and regulated inevitably end up in bed with each other. For an extreme example, witness the decay of the Bolsheviks from a band of ruthless idealists to a gang of corruptionists, building palaces and so forth.(*)

Which means, of course, the more the government has to dispense in the way of favors and permits and so forth, the more rent-seeking in the form of bribery and backscratching there will be.

A bigger State apparatus is inevitably a more corrupt one. You can have a big State or a clean one, but not both, or at least not for long. Platonic "guardians" become corrupt fairly quickly.

That was precisely why 19th-century British liberals were so keen on keeping the civil service small, and on devices like competitive examination. They knew that it was a potent source of sinecures, graft and bribes, not to mention political patronage. That was what Peelites and Gladstonians referred to as the "Old Corruption".

And why they were so contemptuous of places like the Habsburg empire or the Papal states, with their legions of officials. Vienna already had thousands upon thousands in the early 20th century, when a city like Birmingham had about a dozen, with one telephone.

(Someone once defined the traditional Austrian system of government as relying on "A standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of clerks, a kneeling army of priests, and a crawling army of informers.")

(*) there's a joke from the 1980's about Breshnev showing his ancient mother around his dachas, limousines, hunting preserves, and armies of bowing flunkies. She looks more and more worried, until at last she bursts out: "It's all so wonderful... but what if the Reds come back?"

Best wishes for your parents, btw, Charlie. My mother died in 1998, and my father's 87 this year.

The fear of the "Polish plumber" in France -- where they also admit that it takes forever and costs the earth to get plumbing work done if you use the official system -- is a pretty good sign of a system rife with perverse incentives.

The fact that 25% of the population votes for the fascists isn't a good sign either.

In other words, if you regulate too much they'll simply shrug and take their toys somewhere else. Capital is mobile; very highly-skilled management and professionals and technicians are mobile; the rest of us are stuck.

And we are their markets. If they want to sell to us, then they should meet our regulations on, say pollution or labour standards. In real life "a level playing field" is a highly regulated area, and regulations can be designed to operate on sales as well as production.

This has been covered by John Ralston Saul to a far greater extent - you might find On Equilibrium worth a go, although not all in one dose.

The fear of the "Polish plumber" in France -- where they also admit that it takes forever and costs the earth to get plumbing work done if you use the official system -- is a pretty good sign of a system rife with perverse incentives.

And what of a system which is nominally free-market, wherein the government spends more than the governments of other more "socialist" systems, wherein private spending is more than government spending, and yet which delivers worse results for society as a whole than said more "socialist" systems? A situation increasingly written into the very bodies of its citizens?

"And what of a system which is nominally free-market, wherein the government spends more than the governments of other more "socialist" systems,"

-- if you're referring to the US, the federal government took about 18% of GDP, last time I looked. Most of Europe is over 40%.

De-nile, De-nile...