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Author Alasdair White
During their academic careers, students go through a series of major changes and entering university is one of the most significant. From primary school through to the end of secondary school, they have been in a ‘protected environment’ under the control of teachers; at home, they will have had parental guidance and support; and within their local community, they will have developed friends and a social life. Going to university changes all this. From being in a controlled predetermined learning environment and living within supportive social context, the student is suddenly faced with an academic environment that demands much greater independence and personal responsibility, while at the same time having to cope with a radically changed and possibly much less supportive social context. Ill-prepared and ill-equipped to manage the changes facing them, students struggle and it is not surprising, therefore, that universities find themselves faced with a significant ‘drop-out rate’ in the first year that, in the UK, averages 22% and ranges up to and in excess of 40%. And the problem is repeated across Europe, North America, and Australia. Read the rest of this entry »
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Author Alasdair White
Do the public really care about the banking crisis and the fact that governments are using tax-payers’ money to bail out the financial institutions?
The instinctive response is: YES, they do care and they resent the fact that banks are being rescued having lost a lot of money. But the counter-intuitive response is rather different.
Over the last fifteen years or more, the populations of the developed economies have been saving less and spending more than they can afford. Saving rates in places like the UK and the USA have fallen to virtually zero – well below a healthy savings rate of about 5-7% of disposable income. One explanation for this is simply that interest rates are so low that the saver gets little or nothing for their prudence and with inflation rates almost matching interest rates, the real return is either zero or negative. Combine that with the taxation that is levied on the interest earned and there is absolutely no incentive to save anything. Read the rest of this entry »
Author Alasdair White
The collapse of General Motors has nothing to do with the current world economic crisis and it has everything to do with the failure of GM’s management to actually know what it was doing.
For many years the unions and their bloated and unrealistic pensions plans have been bleeding General Motors and will continue to bleed GM until it implodes and becomes little more that an interesting case study for university professors specialising in the collapse of Western manufacturing. Are the unions to blame for this – well, yes … and no! They did what they were supposed to do and extracted whatever they could from the employers on behalf of the workers BUT their interest was strictly short term and focused entirely on what they thought they were entitled to rather than what was sustainable for the company over the long term. In many ways, the unions thought that long term planning was concerned with what they would do at the weekend, while short-term planning was about what they would eat for lunch. Read the rest of this entry »