Posts by Scott Chris
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to Sacha,
what does that mean?
It means it's all very well having smaller class sizes but if they make no difference to learning outcomes then they are a waste of money.
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to Ross Mason,
It is obvious that this paper has been influencial in the govts argument.
Maybe. Not sure what the government's argument was.
Still, what Hattie seems to be saying is that there is no sense in putting the cart before the horse. For smaller class sizes to have a substantially positive effect on learning outcomes, first teaching practice has to be modified. Hattie's suggestion of an incremental approach to this transition phase makes sense to me.
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to Russell Brown,
Roughan is one of the stable of editorial writers. Working out out which ones are by him is a game I like to play at home.
Like shooting fish in a barrel. You simply pick the rough un.
Regarding class size – well, the evidence appears to show that smaller classes do lead to better learning outcomes, but only if the teacher is competent and properly trained. Problem is, we have no reliable method of assessing teacher competency in our public schools.
Some researchers have not found a connection between smaller classes and higher student achievement, but most of the research shows that when class size reduction programs are well-designed and implemented in the primary grades (K-3), student achievement rises as class size drops.
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Speaker: The Voyage: Dutch Disease –…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
A bad idea for several reasons:
Maybe, maybe not. Depends how it’s implemented I guess.
That argument aside, a more radical notion would be to ‘un-float’ (I hesitate to use the word ‘sink’) the dollar and charge the reserve bank with the responsibility of setting its value relative to the TWI. I’d be curious to know your thoughts on why this would be a bad idea.
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Speaker: The Voyage: On Interpreting and…, in reply to DexterX,
people in the end do what they want and can afford to do.
Yes, within the context of the economic environment peculiar to each country. If there is a tax on land, you have no choice but to pay it. If discretionary spending is a driver of inflation a land tax compensates for that without directly affecting those most in need – the landless.
In contrast to your hot air balloon analogy, consider a mad scientist’s lab with an elaborate construction of millions of glass tubes, bubbling beakers and valves, all interconnected. Turn up the heat here, adjust a regulator there, release a valve here, add some ingredients there. That’s how I see things.
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What would we need to do to start transitioning to a more logical economic situation?
Well, we could start with a Financial Transactions Tax on speculative foreign exchange transactions.
Printing money would undermine the value of the $kiwi too.
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Speaker: The Voyage: On Interpreting and…, in reply to DexterX,
I am interested into how you see it as beneficlal that Land Tax will suck surplus cash out of the economy – what surplus cash
I’m suggesting a constructive countermeasure to balance the possible inflationary pressure caused by an increase in the money supply. A land tax is desirable anyway imo.
I feel you don’t understand what money “is” and how things work or can work
Having read your latter post, I would say that the feeling is reciprocally mutual.
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Speaker: The Voyage: On Interpreting and…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Injecting liquidity by giving money to bankers so that they can write even more loans to more people
You're only considering conventional quantitative easing. If you simply 'print' electronic money rather than monetize bank assets then you bypass the banks. The government then uses that money to build houses which in theory would do at least four beneficial things.
1) It would ease the housing shortage.
2) It would undermine demand for real estate.
3) It would undermine the value of a bloated kiwi dollar.
4) It would provide jobs for the unemployed.Easy enough to try it on a small scale to see how much inflationary pressure is generated. Or just slap a land tax (rather than a CGT) on the whole economy to further disincentivise real estate speculation and suck the surplus cash back out of the economy.
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Speaker: The Voyage: On Interpreting and…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
the stimulus programs carried out so far have had direct inflationary effects on the price of land, of shares, of gold and of safehaven bonds.
Perhaps they have been poorly directed. There is certainly an unevenness to pressures of supply and demand within our economy which aren’t being mitigated by market forces for one reason or another, so surely it makes sense to inject liquidity into these areas to address, for instance, the housing shortages in Christchurch and Auckland?
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Speaker: The Voyage: On Interpreting and…, in reply to Brian Murphy,
So somehow we need to be sure in whose interests the negotiators are negotiating.
Yes I agree. I quite like Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig’s voucher system for funding of political parties whereby institutional funding is prohibited and each voter is granted a voucher of, say $50 which s/he donates to the party of her/his choice. The idea being that with no corporate or union funding of political parties a government’s policy will be less tainted by undue political influence.