Sunday Posts

I spent a lot of time over the last few years at the fault line of education and employment. This is a sort of no man's land, a messy swamp of practice that many educators would ignore in their pursuit of an imaginary complete individual who need not care for a job! The employers, who built industrial-scale recruitment operations with the aim of commoditizing hiring, would not bother too much about this area, which fell outside their area of influence. Well-meaning executives, who privately wished for better education in their country and community, thought it best not to challenge educators in their own turf, recognizing the institutional nature of education and feeling rather powerless to change anything. However, almost everyone admitted there was indeed a big gap, and a range of initiatives were spawned in the recent years to solve the problem. In this, I had taken the usual journey. It started with seeking out better courses - could one design courses to meet the ever-ch...

It is time to talk about markets. Differently. One may think there may be nothing new to talk about markets. After all, we have been talking about this endlessly for thirty years now. Markets as the mantra for everything under the sun, the panacea for all our ills etc. Or, if you are negatively inclined, for all the problems we have. Including a new word, to be spoken every time with the same disdain Lady Thatcher used for the word 'socialist', 'marketisation'. What more can there possibly be to talk about the markets? For many, the last few years have shaken the unquestioning magic of the markets: It does not seem to solve all our problems after all. In fact, it can make things quite ugly. Many of the words, 'ethics' prominently among them, which were becoming antiquities have been brought back to use. On the other hand, there is little appetite to revive the old socialist past as we knew it: No one could yet come up with a satisfactory explanation wh...

Seven works of Street Art by Banksy are to be auctioned at a London Hotel today. ( See the story ) If you are not into art, or not into street art, should you care?  I think the 'Banksy Problem' is not about art, but about all forms of creativity. It is about 'market' and 'non-market' debate, and the ideas of how to live. Today's story brings out the issues involved in sharp relief. So here is a celebrated, but unknown artist, who would sneak in the middle of the night and create a graffiti. No one really knows what he, or indeed she, thinks about this latest auction. The hypocrisy of the auctioneer is evident: He is not doing it for money, he says, but to save the building owners who are fearful that with a Banksy on their wall, their buildings will be listed Grade 2 (a building of special interest where every effort should be made to preserve them). He further adds that he does not approve of street art, and considers it illegal.  I am wo...

There is massive arrogance in the technology circles, captured best perhaps by Marc Andreessen's WSJ article proclaiming the same. The rise of the 'information economy', though a bit of jargon in itself, has boosted such rhetoric: Today, technologists confidently sermonise others on how to do healthcare, education, construction, everything else, and even money. It did seem that this is the final frontier, a scientific thesis that is really un-falsifiable. Until Bitcoin. Bitcoin possibly shows what's wrong with this position. It is not about the technology or the economics of it, nor the failure of Mt Gox. It is about the underlying proposition that software can save/ change everything. It may appear arrogant, but the recent pronouncements of Jon Matonis that Bitcoin is a currency in beta and you should only invest if you can afford to lose ( see story here ), is really symptomatic that software may be living inside a bubble itself. And, bubble in this context is ...

For-Profit Education stands, more often than not, for poor education. At a time when big claims are being made for the potential of For-Profit Education to change entire economies and alleviate poverty ( See Parag Khanna and Karan Khemka in HBR ), one must seek to understand why For-Profit education under-delivers.  Because, it is impossible to turn a decent profit in education, claim some. Alan Ryan claims that minus the public subsidies going into For-Profit education, "outside technical training in IT, law, finance and medicine, there’s not a lot of money to be made out of higher education" (Alan Ryan in Times Higher Education, see here ) This observation may empirically bear out as most For-Profit activities happen in areas with immediate employability, and where cost of delivery is low (For-Profits in medicine have often come up short, and For-Profit Engineering Education has usually been a disaster). There is more. The history of For-Profits has so far been th...

Jim O'Neill has come up with a new acronym - MINT - and it has already hit the radio waves. Whether this ends up making waves as BRICS did, we will see: Famous as he is with these acronyms, his N-11, a list of 11 countries that were to become the next movers-and-shakers of the world economy, failed to gain traction. Perhaps, eleven countries were far too many to be optimistic about (and for bond traders, to focus on) and therefore, this new catchy shortlist making the memorable acronym, which has a good chance of success. It is interesting to see that people are getting excited about this new set of countries just as the previous set, BRICs, seem to be in some sort of trouble. Indeed, articles such as 'Broken BRICS'   and 'The Great Deceleration ' (with a memorable cartoon of BRICs countries drowning in a quicksand) have appeared during the course of last year, pointing out the many problems these economies faced once their stellar growth rates slowed down an...

I participated in a discussion on International Students in British Universities yesterday, organised by the Society of Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Policy Network. This was at the London Metropolitan University, which is where Policy Network events always happen: However, the university being at the eye of the storm of the immigration debate over the last few months, the event assumed a particular, if unspoken, significance. As usual, it was very well organised - one tends to meet very interesting people and gets to hear perspectives never previously thought of - and presented a friendly and open environment for everyone, a fairly mixed audience, to participate. This post is not so much about what was discussed. I am in no position to write any comprehensive summary, and have no intention to report on what was primarily an open and frank conversation. However, there are a number of broad issues that came up and are worth considering within an wider audience. First, the...

We live in an age of market fundamentalism. That is, live by an assumption that the markets are cure all, and as long as we free everyone's hand to buy and sell at whatever price one chooses, everyone will get the best deal by the magical work of the invisible hand. This doctrine is being pushed everywhere: In an age where the sovereign states live in mortal fear that George Soros may pull their money and bankrupt them overnight if they don't toe the line, markets are made to penetrate every sphere of our life, in education, health care, environment, relationships and even births and deaths. The idea of the markets has become hegemonic, so widespread that one can not see its edges and question its limits; indeed, questioning the merits of the markets is seen as blasphemous and unusual. However, still the criticisms of markets are emerging. First, that this represents a fairly narrow view of human race, that it is driven by self interest, despite many evidence on the contra...

The consensus is that Higher Education is broken, which is strange, because we are seeing an unprecedented rise of Higher Education. Every year, more and more people want to go to college, new institutions get set up, more graduates come out, more research money becomes available and more media coverage, measured in column inches, gets dedicated to Higher Education. The only thing that is going down is how much the Governments spend on Higher Education, but that is at the back of the general demise of the welfare state and the currently dominating view that Higher Education is primarily a 'private good', that it makes its recipients richer, and therefore should remain in the realm of private enterprise. This growing demand and shifting structure allows us a view of a sector in motion, where, with us as witness, the structure and the processes may all change, along with the attendant relationships, world views and what it actually does. So, here is my hypothesis: Commercial...