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Milton Friedman t.v. series available on-line, by singapore economist: Andrew Chamberlain of the

The Idea Shop points out that legendary economist Milton Friedman's
television show "Free to Choose" is now available on-line for free...

Original 1980 Series (10 Volumes):
Volume 1: Power of the Market
Volume 2: The Tyranny of Control
Volume 3: Anatomy of a Crisis
Volume 4: From Cradle to Grave
Volume 5: Created Equal
Volume 6: What’s Wrong With Our Schools?
Volume 7: Who Protects the Consumer?
Volume 8: Who Protects the Worker?
Volume 9: How to Cure Inflation
Volume 10: How to Stay Free

Updated 1990 Series (5 Volumes):
Introduction by Arnold Swarzenegger
Volume 1: The Power of the Market
Volume 2: The Tyranny of Control
Volume 3: The Failure of Socialism
Volume 4: What’s Wrong With Our Schools?
Volume 5: Created Equal

I'm just sitting listening to the Any Questions Lib Dem leadership contest special and I just heard Chris Huhne, in response to a question about whether they were more afraid of Gordon Brown or David Cameron, say that one thing that scares people about Gordon Brown is that he cannot keep his hands out of other departments' business.

How timely an answer, because it has just been announced today that Kate Barker, she of the housing market report that was commissioned a couple of years ago (and who said herself that she didn't know much about housing economics at the time!) has now been asked to do a review of the Land Use Planning system...by...The Treasury:

The terms of reference of the review are:

To consider how, in the context of globalisation, and building on the reforms already put in place in England, planning policy and procedures can better deliver economic growth and prosperity alongside other sustainable development goals.

In particular to assess:

• ways of further improving the efficiency and speed of the system;
• ways of increasing the flexibility, transparency and predictability that enterprise requires;
• the relationship between planning and productivity, and how the outcomes of the planning system can better deliver its sustainable economic objectives; and
• the relationship between economic and other sustainable development goals in the delivery of sustainable communities.

I wonder how much Ms Barker knows about planning. She's turning into the economist's version of Louise Casey methinks.

University fees. Oh dear, what a sensitive subject. I've just watched Question Time's "Next Generation" edition and the biggest applause came for a question on scrapping tuition fees, and today I had my last Academic Board here in which we were treated to a presentation on the National Student Satisfaction Survey initial results.

I'm reminded that Stephen Tall takes an apparently very un-Lib Dem position on tuition fees and that we are currently thinking about the party's future policy on Higher Education funding. But, horror of horrors, I think I'm beginning to agree. I suppose I ought to be careful about what I say here. I am one of the elected staff governors of my institution, and at some point in my four year term I dare say we're going to have to take a position on the future of university fees in order to feed into the process of deciding what happens next when the £3,000 annual cap on fees is debated around 2010.

Next academic year, as the elected governor, I am hoping to host a series of events for staff and students to help inform any decision I might have to participate in on this and some other pressing issues, such as the pressures universities face to bring in corporate "partners" (privatise to most people I suspect) in various areas of operation. So for now, these thoughts are just musings on what might be one line of reasoning.

Back to the National Student Satisfaction Survey. We were presented with a very pretty colourful document showing a table with red blobs for where the university scored in the lower quartile of student responses nationally and green ones where we scored in the top quartile, and yellows for he in-between areas. There's a huge project going on nationally to collect and interpret these data and eventually the "results" will be on the UCAS website supposedly to help prospective students decide where to go.

I have to say they seem pretty subjective - for a start universities themselves can't control in what groups, and some of them seem pretty counter-intuitivie, particular subjects may be placed. And then the raw figures do not seem to reflect the numbers of students on a course. So you could have a hundred courses with three students on each, where one student completed the survey and gave you a bad mark and you'd end up with a hundred rows of "red" squares and one course with a thousand students on where 700 completed the survey and gave you top marks and you'd end up with a mostly red page.

And I suddenly realized where in my varied career I had seen such a chart before. It looked just like the old Stock Exchange FTSE-100 SEAQ/Ceefax prices screen with reds for falling shares and in that case blue for rising prices. And it got me thinking...someone is expending an awful lot of effort to translate student perceptions into some pseudo-objective rating for an institution or subject that is intended to give a guide on which basis people will choose what institution or course to go to.

But because there's no real market in fees - practically nobody has decided to charge less than the £3,070 "maximum" fee (mainly because it is nothing like enough to make up for the 60% real terms drop in state funding over the past couple of decades) - this perceptual information cannot translate into prospective students' value judgment about where to spend their money. This effectively compulsory tax on learning cannot put a price on any particular course or institution or any number of factors why someone might want to study somewhere.

There seems to be an assumption, from my observations of conversations of other governors and senior management of universities, that the fees cap will need to be completely abandoned when the next decision date comes along in 2010. And they're right, to an extent. This muddle cannot continue. It is serving nobody. We either have to bite the bullet and fully fund free higher education, in which case you either give all institutions the same unit funding and those in which excellence comes at a price will descend to mediocrity, or we have to open up the market so universities charge their full costs in fees and make their own decisions about who to assist to afford their prices, to whom to offer discounts and for what subjects and so on.

This latter will be painful - we do not have a culture of people saving up front for college as they do in the US for example, or the incentive that though they may be not well off, they can make it onto their desired course if they achieve the grade to stand out and get a scholarship. And of course in my ideal world of land taxes paying for a citizens income there would be something to save for college, even for the least well off families. But we cannot lurch from one government decision to another every few years. This next decision in 2010 needs to be the last. It needs to set out a longer term target - either to return to full funding or to aim for a totally open market, over the course of, say, a decade, so that youngsters only just entering education now, and their families, know what to expect by the time they get to deciding on university courses.

I started to write this on Thursday evening. As I come to complete it, this story is just breaking in the Guardian. QED?

Technorati Tags: higher education, tuition fees, radicalism

Whenever there’s some new planning consultation we are indebted to the CPRE for explaining its supposed consequences.

But I’m slightly confused at what appears an hysterical reaction whatever the Deputy PM’s office says. Which bits of the following do the CPRE disagree with:

That “this…paper discusses how planning delivers housing at the local level, and the new mechanisms involved…not…issues concerned with the overall level of housing growth and how it is determined…” or perhaps the core policy aim “that everyone should have the opportunity of a decent home?”

Do groups such as CPRE and the Green Belt Alliance have policy about the level of need in Oxfordshire and how to meet it? Or doesn’t it matter so long as the land values of their own homes hold up and they have somewhere to walk the gundogs? Is squalor, extortion and overcrowding for some a price worth paying for that? He mentions building for incomers while the available data suggests that 95% of Oxfordshire’s household growth is local demand.

I share their view that Green Belt development is not yet necessary, but at least some propose possible solutions, such as Land Value Tax (NOT Development Land Tax which the government is imposing and will more likely stifle development completely) or Community Land Trusts putting control of development into the hands of local communities.

We only seem to hear the “BANANA” (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) option from such groups. They cannot be completely blind to some need – probably affecting some of their friends, colleagues and families – children whose only “affordable” option seems to become a constituent of Mr Prescott?

This consultation is about promoting planning authorities working together to identify need and plan for it across local housing markets, instead of passing the buck to their neighbours. It may even help places like Oxford actually understand the market so they can look for other ways of responding to need than simply extending the city.

But let’s not let the reality get in the way of a really good piece of scaremongering.