Everywhere I look this week, I find arguments on education funding. From legitimate political organisations to tasteless and puerile satirists, everyone’s talking about how to pay for education.

Now, “choice” in education (other than adult education) is patently a nonsensical concept – the consumer, being a child, can’t make a rational choice. This is why the state needs to be involved.

Any economically rational person would take the amount of education required to give them basic reading/writing/numeracy skills; the vast majority would take more. Unless a person was an extremely proficient sportsperson or skilled manual worker, they’d be willing to pay a great deal for this.

Since children aren’t economically rational people, this doesn’t work. And while their parents may be rational, it’s not clear that a parent’s interests in this sphere are necessarily exactly in line with the child’s. Many – indeed, most – parents both understand the value of education and are willing to make major sacrifices to ensure their child receives it. But not all.

This means that in the absence of external intervention, any education system will benefit children whose parents meet the “value” and “sacrifice” criteria above far more than those whose parents don’t. Assuming a lack of perfect capital markets, parents with ready cash will also have advantages (you can’t borrow the fees for Eton – or to hire a private tutor – using your child’s prospective earnings if they become an erudite merchant banker as collateral).

So state intervention in education has two important functions: to force reluctant parents to invest in their child’s education; and to permit parents who wish to invest in their child’s education but are restricted by financial constraints to do so.

The most efficient way to ensure this happens is to:

1) establish an enormous centralised bureaucracy to run all schools
2) ensure that parental income, above any other consideration, is the main determinant of education quality
3) ensure that the system’s biggest beneficiaries are parents who both wanted to, and were able to, fully fund their child’s education anyway

Wait, no. That’s just what actually happens in the UK and (+/-) the rest of the developed world. Maybe that’s why this is such a hot issue…

Don’t ask me why I found this. But I’m worried at quite how niche the meta data on porn sites is getting… are there really that many people out there with a rightwing leftist fetish?

Finance
G7 finance ministers agree not to mention China when blaming economic problems on, err, China

Entertainment
Crazed bloodthirsty Scots attempt to assassinate country peaceniks

Geography
Venice, the Portsmouth of the south

Politics/truisms
Blind continue to lead blindly stupid

More tomorrow, on the Shot By Both Sides channel. Brought to you live from the Murdoch family wind tunnel.

This has been around for a while (on NTK, which I’ve long read quasi-religiously), but I haven’t spotted it before:

It’s a shame I didn’t see it when it was originally posted in February 2000. In February 2000, I was busy trying to cram for university finals, spend a week snowboarding, and deal with an ultra-recently-ex-girlfriend (who’d managed to break her collarbone while spending said week snowboarding, and blamed me, obviously). So I needed, my God I did, all the light I could get…

Update 29/09/03: Chris Lightfoot points out that this is a fake. Sad news indeed…

It’s pretty much a truch universally acknowledged that Ronald Reagan was “a little odd”. Many also believe that he had little impact on government policy, leaving that to professionals like David Stockman.

Judging by the latest news, the latter is probably just as well. However, I hadn’t realised the old man was capable of quite such feats of humour.

He said he had told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that “if and when we had [a Star Wars missile defence system]… we’d share such a defence with them”. “I don’t think he believes me,” he added.

I wonder why?

I haven’t been following the Ontario elections: much as I love Canada and the Canadian people, the influence of Canadian state elections on, well, me, is pretty limited. (I have, however, been following the California campaign – does that make me US-biased? Will Canadians everywhere uprise against my imperialism?)

Anyway, I’m starting to regret not following Canadian politics. How can you not love an election campaign where one candidate describes another as an “evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet“?

I wonder if this was a reference to David Icke‘s reptilian conspiracy theories? I’m led to believe his ideas are in wide circulation in Canada.

Of course, David’s talking nonsense. Everyone knows that the secret cabal controlling the world is actually made up of Jews Zionists Mossad communists Eurocrats neoconservatives liberals the extended Bush-Bin Laden family the UN… we’ll get back to you on that one, OK?

Just read the headline for this story as “Brady wins right to public hanging”.

And yup, he probably has (although I don’t believe we have the right to administer it, and other liberal disclaimers).

Unsurprisingly, the Cancun round of WTO negotiations has collapsed.

Developing countries blame the EU and (to a lesser extent) the US and Japan for refusing to give up farm subsidies and agricultural export subsidies. Fair point. The current global agricultural trade regime is the scummiest thing the developed world has given the developing world since syphilis, and there’s pretty strong bipartisan agreement on that score. Multipartisan agreement, even. Obviously, we should abolish these unilaterally, tomorrow, WTO or no WTO.

That said, the developing countries did themselves no favours by rejecting the “Singapore issues” – making government procurement transparent, enforcing antitrust rules, reducing non-tarrif barriers, and cutting restrictions on foreign investment. Since corruption is one of of the main other things keeping poor countries poor, and the primary result of all four measures above would be to reduce corruption, it’s hard to view developing world governments’ opposition as principled…

Anyway. Lots of people will say more articulate things about this than me. Some, or possibly all, of them will be entirely wrong. So will I, probably…

I’m also rather interested in the behaviour of the US. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick told reporters that poor countries’ unrealistic goals were to blame. Now, Mr Zoellick hadn’t staked his reputation on the Singapore issues – rather, these were pushed by the EU*. A good political move for Mr Zoellick, it would seem, would have been to try and negotiate a compromise that involved retracting the EU’s insistence on Singapore altogether. Suddenly, the US is a friend of the developing world against European badness. Hooray! God bless America, etc.

But he didn’t – instead, he sided with the EU’s position, and then cried crocodile tears when everything fell apart. Could this be a US government attempt at a touchy-feely reunion with its European ex-friends? The timing of the desperately needed new Iraq resolution in the UN Security Council, the petulant opposition of France, and France’s position as the leading beneficiary from the EU’s bizarre agricultural system are (of course) entirely coincidental.

Oh well. Hopefully it’ll only be third-world farmers, and not both third-world farmers and the people of Iraq who are sacrificed on this ridiculous (but necessary, until EU and UN reform removes arrogant, marginalised ex-powers from positions of great power) altar.

* a cynic might claim the EU was never going to do much about farm subsidies, and poor countries were never going to acccept Singapore, so insisting on the latter gave EU negotiator Pascal Lamy an excellent get-out clause…

It looks like the Indian police have caught Nasir, the “terrorist mastermind” (think Magnus Magnusson crossed with Ernst Blofeld) behind last month’s Bombay bombings. Well, for “caught”, read “shot”. Convenient, but probably well-deserved. The police also seem on track to catch much of the rest of the group, Lashkar-e-Toiba – except the 19 people sheltering in Pakistan, of course. Hopefully that particular terror state is somewhere on Donald Rumsfeld’s secret list…

Meanwhile, what about the bombers’ claimed justification – last year’s anti-Muslim pogrom in neighbouring Gujarat, which killed around 1000 people? Its perpetrators have not received such swift justice, chiefly thanks to the complicity of the state’s Hindu nationalist chief minister Narendra Modi. Independent investigators into the riots have found that his government “not only justified the massacre but his entire government machinery was involved in it” (The Tribune). He’s even wanted as a war criminal in Belgium, albeit under the same slightly batty law that could have somewhat disrupted Tommy Franks’ visits to NATO HQ.

Mr Modi is unlikely to go the way of Nasir – although, he too probably won’t see trial (I guess we could try to lure him to Belgium – Hindu nationalist chocolate, anyone?). Still, it was nice to see the Indian Supreme Court ordering him to punish the ringleaders or quit his job. Whether that ruling will be enforced, given that Mr Modi’s BJP allies control parliament, is another question.

Imagine no idiots using religion to further their own murderous, power-grabbing desires. It’s quite hard, even if you try.

Sometimes, Silvio Berlusconi’s witless, offensive ramblings make me want to change my views on the acceptability of political assassination. Then I breathe, thank various deities that he’s not running anywhere powerful, important, or where I live, and return to my normal life.