Thomas Picketty is a great person to read if you're interested. He has laboriously gone through the data of social economies since the war, and showed that financialisation has led to a system where it's becoming easier to make money from the assets you already own than to make it if you have none.

This isn't a sign of an effective system. Rather, he says this is what happened to the Dutch, Venetian and British empires at their peak, where capital got moved in to banks and endlessly speculated on, lowering levels of investment and enterprise. That period preceded the decline of those empires.

We can go down one of two roads. Allow that system to continue to operate as it wants to, which means the proportion of wealth found in the rest of society will continue decreasing. Or we can take them on, support those in need and give future generations something to work for.

Yep, but again, look at the kind of middle class grammar schools have given us.

They might as well have gone to secondary. There just aren't enough people made of the right stuff.

The 'choice' argument is certainly a point on the side of private schools. However, private schools get tax breaks that the 'average Joe' taxpayer ultimately covers....what choice does 'Joe' get? He can't afford to send his child to those schools.

I suppose there are lots of points in the debate about how the nation educates its children.

For me, the strongest point in their favour is the meritocracy argument of having the brightest taught by the brightest.

But look at where that got us.....It's just a carve up of resources and opportunities for the middle classes to cement their advantages.....something that is totally understandable but it isn't actually what the system was meant to do....What are the products of these schools been doing for the nation at large? Most of them actually detest it and only feather their own nests.

Edited by Stirlingsays (23 Sep 2019 6.19pm)

If the costs are entirely met by themselves.

Well I've kind of put forward the 'so what' bit. but fair enough. It's not a hill I'm dying on.

A lot of businesses have the current pay rates factored into their business model with employees already working at their peak. Supermarkets are azprime example. You want to not work as hard as now when a lot of businesses rely on the output at the current level.

As you can see, I’m lost on the logic here. It might work in jobs where there’s a lot of downtime, like in career office professional jobs but in manual jobs or where employees are essentially just a number then I don’t see how this works or makes any sense. You’re just increasing the highest cost in a business by 20%. In the end the U.K. would just be less competitive.

Edited by Rudi Hedman (23 Sep 2019 2.47pm)