Poland's education paradox

Every three years, the OECD - the rich countries' club - issues the result of its PISA survey (Programme for International Student Assessment). It compares education attainment, measuring 15-year-old pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. The 2018 edition, comparing 72 countries, was published on Tuesday.

Once again, Poland does well. It's in the Top Ten for reading and maths and at number 11 for science. Given that China, in the broadest sense, takes up four separate places in the Top Ten (four cities in mainland China -  Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang - and Hong Kong, Macau and Taipei), Poland actually does very well.

Among European countries, Poland is beaten in reading by Finland, Estonia and Ireland; in maths by Estonia and Netherlands, and in science by Estonia and Finland. Although for some (methodological?) reason, Poland didn't do so well in the 2015 survey, the one conducted in 2012 also had Poland in two of the three Top Tens (for reading and science). In 2012, 2015 and 2018, Poland was well above the OECD average in all three areas.

Set in a global perspective, Poland's performance as a country in its ability to educate its teenagers is notable. Compared with the teaching methods used in Finland, widely praised by educationalists, Poland's high schools are somewhat pedestrian. They still emphasising rote learning rather than the acquisition of knowledge through analysis or testing of hypotheses, tutorial-style discussion or teamwork.

My own theory is that the fancy stuff comes later. When a brain is young, it absorbs facts; you learn to make sense of them later. The Polish system doesn't let down the less gifted, less academically inclined children - they bang in the facts along with the bright ones and regurgitate those facts in exams. Zakuć - zdać - zapomnieć - 'cram, pass, forget' is an old watchword from Polish schools. Yet somehow, they end up doing much better than British schools; in the latest PISA report, Poland stands four places above the UK in reading, eight places above the UK in maths and  three places above the UK in science. Despite far lower budgets and resources (and don't even mention teachers' pay), Poland's schools perform*. Parents' attitudes are important. From whatever social class one is from in Poland, there is an appreciation for learning. The term 'girly swot' for a pupil (of whatever gender), doesn't function in Poland - kujon is nowhere near as insulting, carrying with it a hidden undertone of admiration. Parents rich and poor, urban and rural, all appreciate the importance of education for getting on in life.

Educationally, things work comparatively well in Poland - until the pupil passes their matura (high-school final exam, A-Level equivalent) and goes to university. Here, the system is little different to school. Cram and regurgitate. Run around with a little book (indeks) collecting signatures to prove you've been to lectures. Do not - under any circumstance - undermine the professors' authority by asking them difficult questions.

So while Poland's in the Top Ten when it comes to 15 year-olds' educational attainment, there is not one single Polish university in the Times Higher Education's 2019 global Top 600 ranking. Whereas Italy has 38. Universities. In the global Top 600. Italy. A country ranked 22 places below Poland in high-school reading, 21 places below Poland in high-school maths and 29 places below Poland in high-school science.

Five years ago, Poland had two universities in the Top 400 (Jagiellonian and University of Warsaw); today they languish between 601 and 700. [More about this here.]

It is therefore unsurprising that the brightest Polish school leavers go abroad to study, repelled from Polish universities by the unreformability of its elderly professors. And once those young Poles have gone, it's few of them that come back to Poland to put their talents to use back home. Only 3% of Poles who've made it Oxford or Cambridge return. Brains gone for good.

So we get to the paradox. Polish schools' output is highly prized by foreign investors, who keep on coming, setting up successive shared-service centres and business outsourcing operations of ever-higher levels of complexity and sophistication ("we're looking for a couple of hundred PhDs in maths to do quantitative analysis for us"). Poles are thirsty for knowledge, life-long learners, ambitious and demanding new challenges. This is what foreign investors like. If only Poland's professors were to take a view more suited to the realities of the modern world. It will still be a decade or two so before the last of the professors who started teaching at Poland's universities in communist days finally shuffle off to the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky. Until then, they will block Poland's progress.

* Fieldwork for the survey was conducted before the radical - and I'd say entirely pointless - reform to the Polish school system, that puts middle-school pupils aged 12-15 with primary school children rather than with the 16-19 years-olds in high schools.

This time last year:
What I was going to say at COP 24 (but didn't)

This time two years ago:
Milton Keynes

This time three years ago:
Warsaw by night, early winter

This time six years ago:
Burn less gas and do Ukraine a favour

This time nine years ago:
Early evening atmosphere

This time 11 years ago:
Toponyms - how many names has Jeziorki?

This time 12 years ago:
On the road to Białystok

The ebb and flow of globalisation

Two snippets of news from the Nikon corporation that emerged last week suggest that globalisation is not a one-way street, and that it has its limits.

We learnt that Nikon is pulling out of manufacturing operations in China. Wow. The cheaper end of the Nikon camera range have been made in China for 15 years. The news suggests that a) Nikon is withdrawing from the point-and-shoot end of the photo market, where camera-equipped smartphones are big competition, and b) that China is becoming increasingly expensive as a manufacturing base.

The second piece of news is that Nikon is closing its sales operations in Brazil. A nation of over 200 million - the 'B' in 'BRICs-, is being told by Nikon that if they want a new Nikon camera they have to go abroad to buy it, or buy a grey import without an official guarantee or support. This suggests that global growth led by developing nations is not a given.

These two pieces of business news show that the forces driving global corporations over the past two decades or so are faltering. Set up a factory in a country with ultra-cheap labour and manufacture products cheaper than ever before so you can sell them into emerging markets and thus grow your global market share, ran the mantra. And the rich world too benefits, as rich-world companies make more profits, and things they sold cheaply to rich-world consumers can be sold even more cheaply with the increased economy of scale.

How many cameras do we need? Well, I have three Nikons (D3300, CoolPix P900 and CoolPixA) plus camera in my phone, and I will definitely buy a mirrorless full-frame Nikon as soon as Nikon makes one. But for most consumers who want an additional camera to the one in their phone, I suspect that one (proper) camera is enough. For it to be sufficiently better than the smartphone one, such a camera needs a high-quality zoom lens (or interchangeable lenses) from super-wide to super-tele, it needs a high shooting rate (three frames a second minimum), excellent low-light capability, and images offering high detail and dynamic range.

The smartphone is killing off low-end digital cameras - good, we have too much stuff, we can do without useless items around the house.

What does this mean for the Chinese people who made cheap Nikons? Not a whole lot. The factory was in Wuxi. No, I've not heard of the city either, but it has a population of 6.4 million. Bigger than Birmingham and Manchester put together. Bigger than Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź, Poznań and Wrocław put together. Wuxi has ten skyscrapers over 200m tall, three of which are over 300m tall. Solar technology, software development and electromobility are taking over from precision manufacturing as the main drivers of Wuxi's growth. Nikon's former employees will have little difficulty in finding new jobs in Wuxi.

Professional and advanced-amateur photographers in Brazil, on the other hand, will find it more difficult to buy a new D850 or D7500 camera, new lenses and accessories - the market will find a way, but the kit (and servicing it) will become more expensive.

Meanwhile in London, I pop into a Five Guys for a takeaway hotdog. I pay £4.99 and tuck in. It is good, taste-wise, this beef hotdog is outstanding. But it is tiny. Literally six mouthfuls and it's gone. A nice aftertaste. I'm left hungry but with less than 3,000 paces to walk, I'll not faint through lack of food. A tiny little hotdoglet for a fiver. In other words 24 złotys. Now, at any Scottish restaurant in Poland for this price, I can buy two Big Macs, two medium fries and two medium Cokes (not that I would want to!), a Big Mac meal being 12zł.

London has become absurdly overpriced, the result of global money pouring in from around the world, not all of it honestly gained. The money is pushing up housing prices to the point where locals can no longer afford to live in town. So the service sector is run by migrants willing to accept uncomfortably crowded living conditions in overpriced flats in Central London, or by migrants willing to accept long and expensive commutes into Central London from distant suburbs. One way or another, wages and high rents mean eating out in London is extremely expensive. And as I pointed out on this blog more than once, public transport in London is 13 times more expensive in Warsaw, despite wages being only three times higher.

The economy, powered by the invisible hand of the market, does not tolerate absurdity for too long. Mechanisms, be they political, regulatory or purely economic, are triggered by unsustainable absurdity. I'll leave the last word to Danny the Dealer from Withnail and I: "London is a city coming down from its trip and there's going to be a lot of refugees."

Things even themselves out in the end. The only question is how dramatically will it happen.

This time four years ago:
Leeds, a city made uglier by crooked developers

This time five years ag0:
Węzeł Lotnisko (now Węzeł W-wa Południe) - works continue

This time nine years ago:
To Lepiarzówka, on the Polish-Czech border 

This time ten years ago:
Its Independence Day

On how the Tories have ceased to be the party of economic liberals

The Conservative Party's annual conference, which finished today, has proved to be a milestone in its history, marking a shift in policies that's more radical than anything we've seen since Margaret Thatcher came to power more than 37 years ago.

Theresa May, who became prime minister by default rather than by popular mandate, has at a stroke reversed the party's role as the champion of economic liberalism. The 'stop migration, then get the best trade deal that the EU would allow in those circumstances' approach to Brexit will hit the British economy badly in the years after leaving the EU. I predict stagflation as last seen in the early 1980s as the UK had to deal with stagnant growth and high inflation. As someone tweeted over the course of the conference, this UK is figuring how it's going to learn to walk after it's sawn its own legs off.

The referendum result was a direct consequence of uncontrollable EU immigration. Being part of the single European market, a construct that Margaret Thatcher pushed for vigorously, the UK had to accept the free movement of labour, along with the free movements of capital, goods and services across the EU. All went well until, in 2004, the EU enlarged itself from 15 member states to 25, including eight countries from Central and Eastern Europe that had shaken off the Soviet yoke barely a decade and half earlier.

It was at this point, that Tony Blair's Labour government, continuing the liberal economic policies of its conservative predecessors, opened the door to free movement of labour to over 70 million citizens of the eight new CEE member states. It did not have to. The UK had the right to a transition period of up to seven years before it was obliged to open its labour market to workers from Poland, Slovakia, Latvia and the rest. The Germans waited - but Tony Blair didn't.

Back in 2004, the UK had over 600,000 unfilled vacancies, and employers across rural parts of southern and eastern England were crying out for workers. Not cheap workers, just any workers. At that time, unemployment in Poland was over 20%. Yet somehow the UK civil servants who did the sums worked out that opening the UK labour market to workers from the new member states would result in 13,500 coming each year. They were wrong. The real figure was 250,000 coming each year.

The rest we know. The new workers boosted UK economic growth, but that growth was uneven, distorted. Though the UK rebounded from the depths of economic crisis faster than any other western European economy, it was only London and the South East that truly felt that recovery.

The rest of England - the England that voted for Brexit - has had rather a harder time.

Mass migration from the EU is only one of four major shocks that Britain faces. In this week's Economist, there's a magnificent special report on globalisation. [Five articles, linked from this page.] It is a must-read to get a good understanding of Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, AfD and other rich-world reactions to the process that's been accelerating for the past quarter-century.

The Economist lists four factors which taken together have caused less-well educated people in the rich world to be relatively poorer than they were a generation ago:

• Footloose capital has moved manufacturing to lower cost emerging economies, China's opening to the world being a major event in this respect.
• Migration - be it from Mexico or Poland, migrants from poorer countries are coming to richer ones like the US and the UK and competing for those manufacturing jobs that have not moved to China.
• Automation - be it factory robots or IT-driven industries that run on algorithms rather than bean-counters. Low-skilled and routine jobs are being automated out of existence.
• Finally, on top of all this - a global financial crisis that began eight years ago with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The deepest and longest crisis since the Great Depression that began with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and lasted until WW2.

Now, looking at the above list, the first three were all phenomena that benefited the rich, the business owners and the senior managers they employ. By outsourcing jobs to lower-cost economies, by investing heavily in automation, profits have been boosted, increasing the gap between the rich world's rich and poor from the historically low levels of the 1970s. And the fourth - the financial crisis - hit the poor far harder than it did the rich.

During the 1990s and 2000s, this process was already under way, but few were fussed as economic growth floated all boats, and new technological toys delighted consumers at ever-lower prices. The aftermath of the financial crisis has left many low- and middle-income families angry at the tax-dodging antics of the global corporate giants and the rich elites that own them.

There is another element that the Economist report did not touch on - the seeming lack of a new motor for genuine growth that could help get the global economy out of the rut it's in. Since WW2 the world has seen the car, the television, household appliances, personal computers, mobile phones, evolve, falling dramatically in price and improving dramatically in performance.

The rich world is stuffocated - we have too much of everything, and cannot think of new things that everyone will want to have but currently doesn't. After the smartphone - what next? All that the world of IT is currently offering is solutions to kill jobs - apps that will make redundant entire swathes of workers. Accountants and auditors will go the way of comptometer operators, thanks to fintech and taxtech algorithms.

Consumers will gain in convenience (shopping - I put goods into trolley, load them from trolley to the conveyor belt at the checkout till, load them back into the trolley, then load them from trolley to car) but globally millions of retail jobs will go when supermarkets invest in RFID/IoT solutions.

Back to the Conservative Party conference. Margaret Thatcher and her 'dries' fought the 'wets' (those wanting to shield the more vulnerable members of society from the effects of red-in-tooth-and-claw economic liberalism). The 'dries' won. Now, Theresa May is seeking, as she says, the centre ground by coming down hard on migrants in the belief that this will help the English working class.

Politically, this is very shrewd; it's an existential blow aimed at both UKIP and Corbynite Labour.

But is it economically shrewd?

The policy responses to an issue as complex as globalisation must be global in scope and expert-led, not knee-jerk reactions such as building a wall with Mexico. It is clear that massive tax evasion by global corporations is a huge issue for governments. The only answer is multilateral action to clamp down on tax havens, profit shifting and profit base erosion - this is better done within the EU. And with the UK government now planning to cut corporation tax to 15% and then some more, the UK is heading to become a tax haven in its own right, the proverbial race to the bottom.

Answers to the problems caused by globalisation? Investing public money in infrastructure. Building railways, canals, roads, pavements [!], water treatment plants, renewable energy plants, extending airports, creating jobs that cannot be outsourced to other countries. But that public money needs to be raised somehow - clamping down on VAT fraud, the grey economy and corporation tax dodgers should do the trick, but only if nation states work together.

The conference which finished today will be seen by future historians as a turning point in British history, one that resulted from the shock result of the 23 June referendum. I predict that the post-Brexit years will be a lean and hungry period. Britain won't see an extra 2,500 young people a year deciding to start studies in medical school to make up the gap left by doctors from the EU. British universities will be hit by a sudden drop in foreign students and lecturers from the EU. British care homes will be short of 83,000 care workers that currently come from the EU. British employers will either have to find huge pay rises to motivate native workers who're currently turning their noses up at the wages that keep those firms competitive - or see their businesses shrink.

Britain's loss could be Poland's gain - but only if the Polish government sees what's really going on and takes appropriate policy measures now.

This time three years ago:
Goodnight Dżerzi - Janusz Głowacki's book reviewed

This time four years ago:
More serious setbacks on Second Metro line construction

This time six years ago:
Leonard Cohen in Katowice

This time eight years ago:
The short-term future of suburban development (How right I was!)

Stuffocation, asceticism and economic growth

We privileged quarter of humanity live our lives surrounded by too many things. Way more things than we need to live a full, harmonious life, reaching our full potential. I'm minded of this as I work my way through my late mother's clothes and books and ornaments - so many objects accumulated... Most of the clothing that I'm giving to charities was bought in the early 1980s (shoulder pads being the height of fashion then). My mother had four wardrobes full of clothes; my father has just one (and a chest of drawers). And I daren't go into the attic...

Watching the Robert Peston's BBC2 documentary about British retail yesterday, the economic model of the UK became clear. Retailers (food, clothing, furniture) became smarter and smarter over the post-war decades, tempting consumers to buy, buy, buy - turning wants into needs, generating desires, which could be gratified immediately thanks to easy credit. It was extremely interesting hearing Stanley Kalms (now Baron Kalms of Edgware), life president of Dixons Retail saying that the retail boom of 1992-2008 was unsustainable. "I was amazed at the ease of obtaining high amounts of credit. You could see customers walking out of the shop with a thousand pounds' worth of equipment, no deposit, no interest for 12 months... but in my heart I knew it could not possibly last." The bankers in league with the retailers, the boom driven by soaring house prices.

"Spend, spend, spend - women were the worst at it, buying stuff you don't want, you open the cupboard, everything falls out, seven pairs of shoes you never wore" said Stuart Rose (now Lord Rose of Monewden), former executive chairman of Marks & Spencer. My mother was not into shoes; rather, she had a large number of skirts, dresses, blouses, twin-sets, jackets and coats. Maybe she was making up for the austerity years that followed the war and the scrimping and saving when her sons were growing up. It all must go; there's too much clutter.

We're surrounded by it. Books belong in bookcases. But everything else must follow William Morris's golden rule: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

If we all lived life this way, our houses would be emptier by half than they are. Don't buy anything you won't find truly useful, or that does not add to the aesthetic joy of your life. Out will go the decorative figurines, the holiday souvenirs, the tasselled scatter cushions... Yet someone makes a living, making, delivering and selling these things.

"Truly useful". The average household power drill in the US is used for less than eight minutes in its lifetime. Borrowing or sharing makes more sense here; the sharing economy, powered by the internet, will move society in this direction. And the internet, by making information accessible to an unprecedented degree, will reduce demand for reference books.

Cutting back on buying stuff will hit the economy. Yesterday I blogged about the automotive industry - if we all drove small cars and kept them (like my father has) for well over 20 years - demand would wither and with it the jobs of the workers in factories that keep churning out ever-bigger cars. Car factories would make fewer cars, the economy of scale would go into reverse, prices would rise, as cars get pricier so they are treated better and end up carrying on for six or seven decades like the late-1940s cars on Cuba. The Far East's looms would stop spinning if everyone thought twice or more about buying that new shirt or blouse, or repairing old clothes. How much do we really need to attain true happiness, and maximise the potential that our life has offered us?

An ascetic life, pared down to the essentials (for me, an elegant, spacious zero-net-energy house on Warsaw's fringe, a well-equipped kitchen, tasteful simple furniture, cherished books, no more clothing than needed and two-wheel transport) multiplied by two billion inhabitants of the developed world - would crush economic growth.

Growth? One sector that's growing nicely is self-storage. Can't bear to part with things you no longer need, nor give you pleasure? Box them up and pay someone to store them! There's a self-storage warehouse in West Ealing by Jacob's Ladder footbridge, always busy whenever I pass.

In the old days, there'd be antique, bric-a-brac and junk shops (in descending order of poshness and price). Trouble is, there's a tidal wave of antiques, bric-a-brac and junk everywhere - all can be bought and sold on eBay (Allegro in Poland); in the 1960s, things were rarer and more valuable and could raise the tone of your dwelling. Today, it's all been downgraded to junk - unless you really know what you're looking for. My mother knew Chinese porcelain - I neither know anything about it nor want to know anything about it. I know old cameras - but then again, these have gone the way of everything else - what was once a highly prized classic bull's eye Zeiss Contarex is now an old camera that's not even digital. Surrounded by this stuff I hardly know where to turn.

But then... are we consumers moving in another direction - away from things - and towards services and experiences? Who'd impress you more at a dinner party - an immaculately-dressed person, back from Brent Cross Shopping Centre, or a scruff who's just returned from the wilds of Borneo?

The motto of the Millennials - YOLO (You Only Live Once) suggests that stuff will become less important than experience. Stuff's cheap. If not new stuff, 'pre-loved' stuff from charity shops. Not wearing it? Give it away. Make a charity happy. Make a charity shop customer happy. Feel good within yourself about how charitable you are. Win-win-win. Not great news for retailers and manufacturers, but then recycling is so much more virtuous than the slash-and-burn of the late 20th Century consumption model.

Let's apply our consciousness to our consumption process. Buy with awareness of what it is that we are buying - and why we're doing it.

This time three years ago:
Heroes on the wall (for my father)

This time five years ago:
Tax dodge or public service?

This time six years ago:
Warsaw's woodlands in autumn

This time seven years ago:
Still here, the early snow

This time eight years ago:
Another point of view