Danny Dorling's Blog, page 33

Why student loans are a confidence trick for the 85%

The current system of university student funding in England is a confidence trick. It is an attempt to defraud a group of people – poorer students and their families – after having gained their trust by pretending that the system is fair and they will be treated equally. Confidence tricks work by exploiting human traits such as naivety and compassion.

Prospective students are told that it is only fair that they take out a loan to fund their studies at university because otherwise poorer people who do not go to university will, in some way, lose out. They are told that they will on average earn so much more than these people in the future that it is only right that they take out a loan.

A desire for inequality?

These arguments are based on untruths and a desire among some, latent or otherwise, for our future society to be even more unequal. Already the UK has the widest income inequality of any European country other than Lithuania. The Gini coefficient of income inequality, as measured by the OECD, is higher in the UK than it is in Israel, and only just a little lower than that of Russia. It is highly unequal countries, such as the USA and Chile, that tend to introduce the most costly and unfair student loan systems. Chile is also the only OECD country to spend more as a proportion of all secondary spending on private schools, than does the UK.

The only way the current student loans system in England can be justified is if we want the UK to continue being ‘the large country with the widest income inequalities in Europe’ for many decades to come. There is a small minority of English people who do think this is a good idea, but most don’t. For instance, 72% of people in Britain support measures such as maximum salaries for those within the top 1% of earners, 70% support higher top income tax rates, and 62% support a wealth tax on very expensive properties.

We have known that loans are unjust for some time. Even before 2012 when university fees were tripled in size:

‘…debt is unequally distributed. Students who are poor before going to university are more likely to be in debt and to leave university with the largest debts, while better-off students are less likely to have debts and leave with the lowest debts. In 2003, students whose parental annual income was less than £20,480 owed an average of £9,708, and half owed more than £10,392. Students with parental incomes over £30,502 owed just £6,806. So on graduation, the poorest students were 43 per cent more in debt than the richest.’

Students studying at university in France, Germany, Italy and Austria pay just a few hundred Euros a year in fees. In Scotland and Scandinavia they pay no fees at all. One reason that has been suggested for high fees in England is that ‘Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London – rank in the planet’s top 10’ when it comes to university league tables. Interestingly, English institutions top European university league tables (tables produced in England). Yet, adults in England up to age 24 are at the bottom of ability when compared to their European peers in mathematics, relatively poor at problem solving, and in the bottom half of the distribution for literacy.

Read more from the full article this extract is taken from.

The argument is expanded further in Danny’s latest book: “Do We Need Economic Inequality?”

Turning The Tide On Inequality

It is hard to believe that it is any coincidence that by far the most economically unequal large country in the European Union, the UK, was the one that narrowly voted to leave it in 2016. The UK has severe social problems due to severe economic inequality. These include an inability to see unfairness as a problem, and a susceptibility to simplistic immigration-blaming arguments.

The remainder of Europe enjoys greater equality. In every other large European country the ruling elite are far more closely connected to the people because they are economically less separated. Living standards for the median family in France and Germany are higher than in the UK, and the quality of housing is higher.

The UK recently provided the best warning within Europe of what goes wrong when you allow inequality to rise and rise ever higher. Nevertheless, there remain wide variations in economic inequality within mainland Europe that may well also be very instructive.

After the UK, the second most unequal large country in the EU is Spain. For those of us that have studied inequalities for many years there is a somewhat depressing regularity emerging between where a country ranks on the league table of economic inequality, and then its economic, social, and political difficulties.

People may say that the issue of separatism in Spain has little to do with economic inequality; but higher inequality between households within a country is often a symptom of so much more going wrong. As the former BBC economics editor Duncan Weldon recently put it when trying to explain the rise of Trump in the USA: “it’s the inequality stupid”. Weldon was not talking about the inequality between US states, but the inequality between families within those states.

Spain is not as unequal as the UK or USA. It is at no risk of leaving the EU or starting a war with North Korea. But you might be left wondering whether its national government would deal better with devolution, identity and autonomy in Catalonia if Spain taken as a whole were more equitable as a society. The ruling elite in Madrid might make fewer mistakes were Spain as cohesive as France and Germany have become. What matters most is the inequality between individuals and households in a country. The most equitable countries in the world, Norway, Sweden and Japan have few secessionist movements, much less militaristic posturing, and tend not to elect fools to high office.

read more

Extract from a longer article published by “Social Europe” on October 25th 2017 which in turn is taken from the new book “Do we need economic inequality”

Inequality and Insurrection

Seminar by Danny Dorling in a series helping to celebrate 25 years of Development Studies in SOAS, University of London, given on October 17th, 2017

Insurrection is an uprising. Analysts and commentators on inequality have long warned that if inequality is allowed to rise too high there will be insurrection. Thomas Piketty suggested this is why elites should concern themselves with inequality.

Politicians often confuse sounding as if they care about inequality with actually caring.

This talk provides some illustrations of how things fall apart as inequality rises, when it is high and when it is tolerated. It suggests that only the most economically unequal of affluent states consider it to be reasonable to impose high private fees and student loans on education, spread debt across the young and promote precarity.

There comes a point when most people can no longer be fooled into believing that all this is fair.

Read More – on “Do We Need Economic Inequality?

Beware of Kipling-spouting politicians

The world isn’t a plum pudding anymore. It’s time for Britain to stop pretending it can carve it up—and scrap its Imperialist approach to post-Brexit trade.



Opinion piece in Prospect on-line by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, October 9th 2017

In October 2017, Joris Luyendijk made a heart felt plea to the English in the pages of Prospect magazine:

“Why would you allow a handful of billionaires to poison your national conversation with disinformation—either directly through the tabloids they own, or indirectly, by using those newspapers to intimidate the public broadcaster? Why would you allow them to use their papers to build up and co-opt politicians peddling those lies? Why would you let them get away with this stuff about ‘foreign judges’ and the need to ‘take back control’ when Britain’s own public opinion is routinely manipulated by five or six unaccountable rich white men, themselves either foreigners or foreign-domiciled?”

To try to answer Joris is difficult, but we are both English academics who have looked at the changing social geography of the country and how the English have been taught a particular version of their history. A huge problem is that many among us have still not yet accepted that our place in the world is not at the very top.

Had Joris been writing a few days earlier he might also have asked about why the British Ambassador had to tell his near namesake, Boris, to shut up when he was about to say something extremely offensive at a temple in Myanmar. It was, apparently, because Boris didn’t understand just how offensive it was for him to recite the lyrics of a Rudyard Kipling poem about a British soldier kissing a Burmese girl. Worse still, there is the possibility Boris did understand how offensive he was being, but did it deliberately to court favour among a certain camp at home.

The Plumb-pudding in danger – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by Gillray

The Plumb-pudding in danger – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by Gillray. Picture: British Library

Boris’ tone-deaf stunt is unfortunately indicative of a wider issue. Almost two centuries ago, sometime around 1818, James Gillray drew a cartoon of William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte desperately attempting to carve up the world, which appears as a plum pudding. These days, the carving is done by trade deal rather than sword. So where have we got to with those brilliant trade deals planned with the rest of the world after Brexit?

In September 2017, with less than eighteen months to go before the leaving bell tolls, the EU’s chief negotiator (Michel Barnier) told the world that the UK’s approach to leaving the Union was “nostalgic, unrealistic and undermined by a lack of trust.” Two weeks later, Prime Minister May suggested adding another two years before Brexit, prolonging the uncertainty and lack of clarity on trade deals; and not helping display any further signs of trust.

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Economic inequality – what is it good for?

Inequality has become the defining issue of our times. It is what makes the years we are currently living through so different to those of our parents and grandparents.

Political opinion in the UK in 2017 changed at a faster rate than it has changed in many decades. This statement is true if the measure of opinion used is voting intention in polling in May, or the swing in the general election held in June.

The Labour Party rightly raised the issue of economic inequality repeatedly during the election campaign. The Conservative election manifesto advocated meritocracy as a solution, maintaining inequalities but trying to ensure that those who (they suggested) deserve the most get the most. This is part of their logic for high student fees and loans. They suggest these are reasonable as in future we should still expect to be living in a very unequal society where graduates receive much higher pay than other people.

So who are the special people, and does rewarding them much more than others really benefit all? Or has the UK become an example of political incorrectness gone mad; a place that accepts terrible inequalities as if they are reasonable and fair? The UK is now the European country with the widest income inequalities of them all. It is the poster-country for what happens if you let the rich take more and more and more. Many things go badly wrong. The population becomes desperate for change. They are told to blame shirkers, blame immigrants, blame anything but inequality. And they are told this by the few who have taken so much for so long and done such great damage.

Audio recording of a talk by Danny given in St Aldate’s Pub in Oxford based on the book “The Equality Effect” and also informed by recent events:

Delayed discharges: “up to 8,000 people die every year because of bed-blocking on NHS wards”

The increased prevalence of patients being delayed in discharge from hospital in 2015 was associated with increases in mortality, accounting for up to a fifth of mortality increases. The study by Mark Green, Danny Dorling, Jon Minton and Kate Pickett of the Universities of Liverpool, Glasgow, Oxford and York, provides evidence that a lower quality of performance of the NHS and adult social care (as a result of austerity) may be having an adverse impact on population health.

2015 saw the largest annual increase in mortality rates across the UK for almost 50 years, and mortality rates have remained high since. During the same period there have been funding crises and poorer quality of care within the NHS and adult social care.

We demonstrate a positive association between the number of patients delayed in being discharged, and the cumulative amount of time patients were delayed, to the monthly number of deaths and mortality rate. Our results present evidence that a lower quality of performance between the NHS and adult social care may explain part of the increases in mortality rates experienced in England from at least 2015 and onwards.

Reactions: The Guardian: “NHS England declined to comment. A Department of Health spokesman said: “Whilst the results of this research are limited, we are clear that no one should have to stay in a hospital bed longer than necessary.’

The Times: ‘About a fifth of the increased deaths in England and Wales between July 2014 and June 2015 may have been caused by delayed discharge from hospitals’.

The Telegraph: ‘researchers said other explanations – such as flu, the ageing population and random fluctuations could not fully explain the trends. They said the delayed discharges – which are often caused by an inability to arrange adequate social care in the community for people leaving hospital – could be preventing other, sick people from being admitted to hospital for the care they need. “While mortality rates fluctuate year on year, this was the largest rise for nearly 50 years and the higher rate of mortality has been maintained throughout 2016 and into 2017,” the authors wrote in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.’

The Yorkshire Post: reacted by explaining that ‘Meanwhile, those stuck in hospital may experience more stress and anxiety, and could receive less-good care as time goes on.’ Earlier the BBC had explained that some patients were now: ‘dying alone due to lack of NHS staff’ while Sky News reported that Jeremy Hunt the ‘Health Secretary says he disagrees with a Tory minister’s suggestion that the NHS is “close to collapse” amid rising costs of care.’

And the Daily Mail: reported that: ‘The scale of bed-blocking in the NHS is the worst it has ever been, with nearly 4,500 people trapped in hospital at any given time. The problem has more than doubled in the past seven years – from 55,332 beds that were blocked for a whole day in August 2010 to 118,131 in July 2017.’

Links to the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health to read the full paper are here

The scandal of unequal and poor health outcomes and service provision is deepening as the UK government continues to choose to fund its public services at extremely low levels (click on image below, or for more information on health spending click here):

 

Public Spending in proportion to GDP in twelve rich countries

The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida – a Review

This limited survey of the effects of inequality and high house prices in cities is part of the problem, not the solution.

There is something quite shocking about seeing a new contemporary map of London in which the rich areas are labelled “primarily creative class” and the poorer parts “primarily service class”. But this is how the American writer and Toronto University professor Richard Florida portrays cities and sees people. There are those who create and those who serve them.

The book opens with its author recounting what his taxi driver told him on the way in from the airport about all the empty luxury flats in London. This feeds into his theory that the “new urban crisis” is about inequality and house prices, and would apparently be solved if only they could both be reduced a little. However, ending the real crisis might not be that simple.

Presumably the taxi driver was “service class” and Florida, who describes himself as “one of the world’s leading urbanists”, is a “creative”, but is what he is creating useful or harmful? Just above his map of London in the book, he claims that “surprisingly, there is not a single tract in London where the working class makes up a plurality of residents…” That claim is wrong, of course, but so are many of the ideas in this flawed book.

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Illustration by Joseph P Kelly

Image drawn by Joseph P Kelly

Full text of original letter sent to the Financial Times: Examining the numbers on pension valuations

We are concerned about the transparency of decision making in the USS pension scheme. The USS has announced a substantial deficit, but the data and methods they have published are very limited, making them impossible to judge.

The USS manages £60bn in assets on behalf of its members. The most recent USS accounts and reports indicate the scheme has a large deficit. However, the USS provides insufficient information about the methods used to value its assets and liabilities. They present no confidence intervals around the point estimate of the deficit, indication of estimation error, or any sensitivity analyses. They provide virtually no details of what data or analytic code they used to come to their conclusions. Even the CMI 2014 report underpinning the mortality assumptions is not publicly

available.

The USS and Mercer list the assumptions used on page 106 of the most recent report. They also indicate how they have changed the assumptions between 2013 and 2017. In brief, they assume:

1. A fall in the expected long-term nominal investment return from 4.7% to 2.8%.

2. An increase in general pay growth from CPI (2.6%), to RPI + 1% (4.4%).

3. Life expectancy increasing by 1.5% per year.

We find these assumptions curious. First, how can expected investment returns have fallen by 40% in four years? Surely a collapse in returns on this scale would be reflected in the equity or bond markets? Equity markets in high income countries are up 51.7% in the last four years (11% per year). Their assumptions are consistent with a 0.33% per year return on investments after CPI. Is this rate of return possible without a global recession?

Second, in 2014 the USS assumed cumulative pay growth over the following four years of 16%. Yet general pay increases have fallen well short of this, cumulatively increasing by 5.8%. Their estimates of the deficit assume that in future general pay will rise at a rate of RPI +1% (4.4% per year). Is there any evidence that universities will award cost of living increases at this rate? Furthermore, the ONS and the RSS has repeatedly warned that the RPI is a flawed measure of inflation, and should not be used. So why are the USS using it to estimate the deficit?

Third, there has been little increase in life expectancy since 2011. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries estimates that mortality is around 11% higher in 2016 than would have been expected based on the historical trend. This means life expectancy is lower, which will lower the USS’s liabilities.

A shorter version of this letter was published by the Financial Times on September 19th 2017. The link to that and a PDF of this version can be found here

Prof Steven Julious

Professor of Medical Statistics, University of Sheffield

Prof Mark Gilthorpe

Professor of Statistical Epidemiology, University of Leeds

Dr Fred Martineau

Clinical Research Fellow, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Abigail Fraser

Reader in Epidemiology, University of Bristol

Prof Danny Dorling

Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

Prof Yoav BenShlomo

Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, University of Bristol

Dr Rhian Daniel

Reader in Medical Statistics, Cardiff University

Sedona Sweeney

Health Economist, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Ben Goldacre

Senior Clinical Research Fellow, University of Oxford

Prof Charles Taylor

Professor of Statistics, University of Leeds

Dr Joanna Reynolds

Assistant Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Sandra Mounier-Jack

Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Steven Haberman

Professor of Actuarial Science, Cass Business School, City, University of London

Prof Andrew Clare

Associate Dean, Cass Business School

Dr William Johnson

Lecturer, Loughborough University

Prof Kate Tilling

Professor of Medical Statistics, University of Bristol

Catherine Pitt

Assistant Professor of Health Economics, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof George Davey Smith

Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, University of Bristol

Dr Eleanor Hutchinson

Assistant professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Professor David Spiegelhalter

Professor of Biostatistics, University of Cambridge

Dr Tara Beattie

Assistant Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Saul Jacka

Professor, University of Warwick

Prof Martin Bobak

Professor of epidemiology, University College London

Dr Beniamino Cislaghi

Assistant Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Jonathan Sterne

Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, University of Bristol

Dr Luisa Zuccolo

Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol

Dr Natasha Howard

Assistant Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Neil Davies

Research Fellow, University of Bristol

Prof Tim Cole

Professor of medical statistics, University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health

Dr James Woodcock

Programme Lead, University of Cambridge

Dr Hynek Pikhart

Reader in Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, University College London

Dr Ana Maria Buller

Deputy Director Gender, Violence & Health Centre, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Shelley Lees

Associate Professor in Anthropology of Gender, Violence and HIV, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Graham Medley

Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Marcus Munafò

Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol

Dr Josephine Borghi

Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Peter Green

Professorial Research Fellow, University of Bristol

Dr Sam Marsh

Teaching Fellow, University of Sheffield

Prof Guy Nason

Professor of Statistics, University of Bristol

Prof Chris Metcalfe

Professor of Medical Statistics, University of Bristol

Dr Laura Howe

Reader in Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, University of Bristol

Benjamin Palafox

Research Fellow in Pharmaceutical Policy & Economics, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Fern Terris-Prestholt

Associate Professor in the Economics of HIV, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Krishnan Bhaskaran

Associate Professor in Statistical Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Bianca De Stavola

Professor of Medical Statistics, University College London

Prof Martin McKee

Professor of European Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Clare Chandler

Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Aaron Reeves

Associate Professorial Research Fellow, London School of Economics

Matthew Quaife

Research Fellow, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Giulia Greco

Assistant Professor and MRC Fellow, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Caroline Relton

Professor, University of Bristol

Prof Qiwei Yao

Professor of Statistics, London School of Economics

Dr Melisa Martinez-Alvarez

Assistant Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Prof Simon Wood

Professor of Statistical Science, University of Bristol

New ways of seeing the world: a social geographer’s perspective

Oxford Alumni Weekend Lecture, Oxford, September 16th 2017

Geography is the subject that shows you how everything is connected to everything else. This talk begins with new maps of the world stretched to include all of humanity with equal prominence. It then zooms into Europe and considers inequality asking why the UK is so different, before ending with some new views of how the UK may be changing now and what may come of trying to leave the EU.

The 2017 UK General Election Result in Three Graphs

There was one noteworthy feature of the 2017 General Election that has not been commented on at all. For the first time since 1979 the segregation index of British Conservative voters fell.

Extract from article published in Public Sector Focus

For the first time since 1979 the segregation index of British Conservative voters fell. The segregation index is the minimum proportion of Conservatives voters who would have to be moved between constituencies if there was to ever be an absolutely uniform distribution of support for that party. That index had reached a historic peak in 2015, beating its last ever-highest record that was held in 1918. At every General Election from 1979 to 2015 support for the Conservative party rose the most in the areas it had already done best in. That almost forty-year trend ended in June 2017. It is not impossible that the 2017 fall in Tory voter segregation is the beginning of a long fall, such as that which occurred from 1918 right through to the 1960s. Or it could just be a blip as occurred after the October 1974 General Election. It is too early to tell, but it is nevertheless remarkable.

There was so much more to see in the June 2017 UK General Election than has yet been described. It is partly because the result itself was so unexpected that we have not yet fully asked what it might mean and what it highlights. One graph that was widely shared around the Internet shortly after the General Election. It showed that under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership Labour achieved its largest swing as conventionally measured since that of 1945. Arguably the swing was even greater than that of 1945, which occurred over a ten-year period (the previous general election having been held in 1935). This latest swing occurred in just two years.

What happened in 2017 was not really a swing. The Conservative vote did not fall, in fact it rose by 5% to 42% of all those who voted. But the Labour vote rose by almost twice as much, by roughly 10%, to reach 40% of all who voted. Some voters will have swung from Tory to Labour (and a tiny number in the opposite direction), but most of the new Labour votes will have come from people who had voted for other parties in the past or who had not voted, especially from younger voters including those who had never been allowed to vote before because they were too young. The other reason Corbyn did so well is because Blair (in comparison to 1997) had done so badly in 2001 and 2005, Brown did even worse in 2010 and Miliband achieved only a risible positive swing in 2015.

Read more and see the other two graphs here