BRICing it

For those unfamiliar with the acronym BRICs, it was coined by Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs to reflect his perception of the economic potential of Brazil, Russia, India and China; four very populous nations (nearly 3bn people in total; did you know that Brazil's population is a good 30% larger than Russia's now?) with apparently huge potential for growth in the coming years.

Last November, O'Neill reflected on the BRICs 10 years after coining the phrase and concluded that they had grown massively and there was still about the same growth amount to come in the next decade. His BRICs letter emphasised the strength of the BRICs economies against the (unarguable) poor performance of the Eurozone, and concluded that it would be full steam ahead for 2012-2021.

What I find remarkable about the article is how completely it ignores the elephant in the room, which is the political environment in Russia and China (and, to some extent, India) which seems to this humble correspondent a huge landmine underneath their economic growth. For Russia in particular, one has only to read the Streetwise Professor to see the horrific political landscape of Russia which acts as a huge disincentive to external and internal investment: why risk money in Russia when any upside will be devoured by politically connected "partners" and any downside owned by yourself? China may have embraced limited capitalism, but there's no mistaking the political totalitarianism behind it; witness Google's tussles with China and the impossibility of referring to the Tianamen Square Massacre via the Net in China.

Russia as an oil and gas source used to have Western Europe over a barrel: now that shale gas is going big in the UK, this isn't going to last. China thirsts for minerals and oil to feed its boom, but that boom is now a bubble and the longer you keep a bubble blowing, the louder the 'pop'. Who's going to bale out the Chinese local banks with huge but worthless retail and residential property portfolios? The USA is conducting a very successful stealth default-by-devaluation, and China is on the losing end.

I had high hopes for India, but it appears that the temptations of power are too great for the government and it wants to censor information to save the blushes of the powerful. There is no way this ends well for the Indian populace: once the precedent has been set, more and more censorship will be made to hide fraud, abuse of power and huge waste of public money. How can external investors have confidence that the sunlight of publicity will be allowed to shine if backroom deals are arranged to bilk them of their profits?

Of Brazil I know little; I'm naively hopeful that they can drive an economic revival and political liberty in South America, but it's early days.

DSK and his working girls

Dominic Strauss-Kahn, fondler of the help and occasional IMF chief, seems to be in a spot of bother vis à vis his participation in swingers' parties, with his lawyer claiming that DSK may not have been aware that the 10 women sharing his bed were prostitutes:

"At these parties, people were not necessarily dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman," he said.

Well, DSK, with a face and body like yours it should be easy to tell. If you find a woman voluntarily sharing your bed, someone's paying her to be there.

Girls who need more money

An anonymous multinational hiring person writes of the difficulty they have paying new female hires as much as men:

The reason they don't keep up, from where I sit, is simple. Often, a woman will enter the salary negotiation phase and I'll tell them a number will be sent to them in a couple days. Usually we start around $45k for an entry level position. 50% to 60% of the women I interview simply take this offer. It's insane, I already know I can get authorization for more if you simply refuse. Inversely, almost 90% of the men I interview immediately ask for more upon getting the offer.

In my field it's slightly different; software engineering is not exactly oversupplied with people bearing double-X chromosomes, so I think we tend to pitch higher offers to good female candidates. Yes, this is technically discrimination, but frankly the software engineering girls I have known have had to put up with so much hyper-male-induced crap throughout their working lives to get here that they're well worth the money. If you don't know what I mean, you've clearly never spent time with the boys in this field.

But the girls all still accept the first offer we give them.

What confuses me somewhat is that a majority of the best negotiators I have known have been (hard-core career) women, so a simple sexist "girls can't negotiate" doesn't work. So where do the boys go to learn to say "you must be having a laugh!" while the girls stick with "oh, that's great, thank you very much"?

Dear Michael Gove...

Yes, yes, yes, about time! It may even save money, but it'll certainly be a light year head of what we have now.

A spokesperson for AQA (who, incomprehensibly, have chosen a 'web.' prefix for their host name when the rest of the world either uses 'www.') said:

We stand behind our GCSE in ICT with an interesting and up-to-date ICT syllabus. This features challenges such as... OW! OUCH! GET THOSE DOGS OFF... AAARGGGHH!!!

I got about halfway through the syllabus before starting to pray for a quick death. If you want to suck any interest in computing out of children, you couldn't do much better.

Joined up thinking and the NHS

Average cost of a day's bed in an NHS hospital: £225 according to this NHS length-of-stay reckoner. Note that this is a standard bed, not an acute care bed; people in these beds have a reasonable prospect of going home.

Amount spent per head on patient food in over 30 NHS trusts: less than £5 according to a survey of NHS trusts. Note that some trusts spend up to £20 per head, but others less than £3 per head. Note also that this is food for an entire day.

If you want patients to be fit enough to go home, they have to be healthy. If you want someone to be healthy you have to feed them. (You also have to let them get good quality sleep, which is why 14 people crammed into a ward is demented.) Why is this concept so hard to grasp? The only explanation I can think of is that hospital managers want to make a hospital stay such an uncomfortable, miserable, gosh-darned dreadful experience that patients would rather go home and expire than stay there and survive.

In Canada, I've seem hospitals with a Tim Hortons cafe. Now that's a recuperative aid I could get behind.

Dear Nursing and Midwifery Council - WTF?

The Daily Telegraph reports that the Nursing and Midwifery Council is pushing a degree as the minimum nursing qualification. Coincidentally, nurses are losing their sense of compassion.

Well, blow me down with a feather.

Having done nursing training with the voluntary aid societies, I've got some idea what basic nursing skills involve. Here's a clue: 3 years of academic study is not required. Good physical health is a prerequisite; so is compassion, a strong stomach, attention to detail, ability to listen, reasonable grasp of numerical maths and a cool head. [General disdain for most doctors can be picked up with practice.]

The Nursing and Midwifery Council is trying to up-skill the nursing profession, and relegate the non-academic aspects of nursing to auxiliaries and nursing aides wherever possible. Money quote from the DT article:

From next year, anyone wishing to become a nurse will have to study for a full degree in the subject under new standards introduced by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. While the main nursing bodies support the change, patients’ groups are worried it will lead to less caring nurses.

I'm sure that drawing up the curriculum, conducting examinations and inspecting the classes of the nursing degree will be a steady stream of revenue to the NMWC. Guess what? Taxpayers want nurses to nurse. Look it up in a dictionary:

to nurse (verb): to tend or minister to in sickness, infirmity, etc.

Why is the NHS importing so many (Filipino, sub-Saharan African, Spanish) nurses? Because they're actually taught how to care for patients. They may also have good technical skills, but those are secondary to their ability to look after the sick.

Skilled cardiac care, ICU, A+E and obstetric nurses are invaluable to the NHS; that does not replace the need for basic nursing care that dates back to Scutari. The NMWC is burning down the village to roast the pig, and they couldn't seem to care less.

Insane claim of the year - the BMJ

Apparently, increasing the speed limit on UK motorways from 70mph to 80mph will increase obesity according to an article in the BMJ:

The authors say a higher limit could increase gas emissions and air pollution and could lead to increased obesity, with more people taking advantage of shorter car journeys.

An exercise for the reader: assuming the driver takes 1 minute from leaving home to joining the motorway at an average speed of 20mph, and 1 minute from leaving the motorway to arriving at destination at the same 20mph average, what is the minimum distance from start to finish for which she would save 1 minute of travel time by travelling at 80mph rather than 70mph on the motorway, assuming instant acceleration from 20 to 80?

Answer: (highlight to see) at 70mph she travels 1.16 miles per minute, at 80mph 1.33 miles per minute, so X/1.16 = 1 + X/1.33, solve for X and you get X(1.33 - 1.16) = 1.16*1.33: X = 1.54/0.17 = 9 miles (plus 2/3 of a mile either side)

I'm glad that the authors of this paper are devoting so much effort to safeguarding those among us who would rather drive 10 miles than walk it because it's one minute quicker than previously.

[I wish the Grauniad had a link to the paper because I'd like to identify the authors and beat the living daylights out of them. For spouting such specious crap, they don't deserve to live, let alone get funding.]

A measure of the black economy?

Even allowing for journalistic stretch (this is the Daily Mail, after all) the results of a scheme making unemployment benefit claimers do a month of work are quite shocking. Fully 50% of claimants stop claiming either before starting this or very shortly after; they'd rather forgo the £67.50 per week than do the work.

The result isn't quite as clear-cut as the figures suggest, I expect; after all, for a 40 hour week, unemployment benefit is only paying a little over £1.50 per hour. Even if you figure that this scheme requires work only 1 month of every 3, that's still a £4.50/hour rate, well under minimum wage. If you're not overly worried about getting back into work, or expect to do so within a few months, it's not really rational to participate. Pay an extra benefit of £5/hour for those participating in the scheme, taking them over minimum wage, and it might be different.

Still, it's rather worrying if you're a taxpayer - a substantial fraction of unemployment benefit claimants clearly don't intend to work a regular job in the future. This is another validation of the saying that any government can have all the unemployment it's willing to pay for.

None so blind as those that will not see

A terrific comments stream on council housing subsidies over at Mr. Worstall's. It started as an article on the capping of housing benefit paid, but commenter 'Kate' from Islington induced a fascinating conversation on whether her right to live in council housing close to her family in Islington was being subsidised by the taxpayer.

Go check it out. It's a remarkably interesting and enlightening illustration of how people simply won't acknowledge that they benefit from others' taxes, even when it's staring them in the face. An example quote from Kate:

No, I KNOW (not THINK) that council rents are NOT subsidised by the tax payer. No matter what ridiculous spin you try to put on it.

Tim - sorry about the thread hijacking...

It's just too quiet

Anybody else noticed the stream of Eurozone news and policy announcements over the past two weeks?

No, me neither.

In my experience, a prolonged period of silence doesn't indicate that nothing is happening; quite the opposite. I'd bet that the Eurozone governments and banks have been beavering away like crazy at something big. Since there haven't been any obvious leaks, this must involve relatively few people and hence be at a very high level (prime minister and finance minister level).

The few hints I've seen in the news have been around the topic of capital controls which would fit; if you want to impose capital controls in the Eurozone it's going to need to be a big bang, which means serious planning. It's going to be the only way to stop all the Euros flowing out of the PIIGS and into Germany, and the only way that the UK is going to be able to hold sterling down if the Euro implodes and all the Euromoney looks for a safe haven.