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Comments (0)Prime Minister Kevin Rudd thinks the blame for the global financial crisis lies in the “neo-liberalism” of “free market fundamentalism”. His solution is a return to the politics of social democracy.
Rudd wants a system where “government is the regulator”, “government is the funder or provider of public goods”, and “government offsets the inevitable inequalities of the market” (his emphases).
For those with short memories, social democracy in the 1970s came close to turning Australia into a banana republic.
Quadrant Online here presents four more perceptive analyses of the causes of the present crisis and the proper role of government in response.
How to think about economic policy: Peter Smith
How to re-regulate financial services: Lord Adair Turner
Why the securitization market collapsed: Nicole Gelinas
How the subprime crisis originated: Howard Husock
“ If grants were our own money, how much more carefully would we spend them?
I doubt Professor Roger Benjamin would spend $9,600 of his own money on “a laptop and digital cameras”.
If academics are expected to produce research and attend conferences, funding should be found for it. But established scholars shouldn’t be getting years or even semesters off on research leave while undergraduate and graduate students are left at the mercy of casual and temporary lecturers drawn from the ranks of graduate students. That is, give them the funding, but a lot less of it. Not all archives are online, actually meeting people face to face is a good thing to enable the scholarly conversation, some field work is required in some disciplines, but on the whole humanities research should be reasonably cheap. There is a culture in universities of highly remunerated tenured academics who are hardly there, and part time, casual and temporary lecturers who have an uncertain existence for years at a time. And don’t start me on the armies of research assistants who actually do most of the research work . . .
Sorry, didn’t we just have an ‘EDUCATION REVOLUTION”? Where are the attendant increases in standards for our students, in both schools and universities that justified the REVOLUTION? Why is this failure NEVER discussed. I blame the Coalition for not using the words ‘EJAKAYSHUN REVOLUTION’ often and with more savage irony. It was HUUUUUGE claim which amounted to nothing. If a government cannot capitalize on that it cannot do ANYTHING AT ALL.
Have you actually read the article?
And Rudd’s education revolution was about building facilities not about lifting the teaching standards, which in no pinion, have been in exponential decline, at all levels for the past 360 odd years.
Through out this period the university cohorts, especially those involved in humanities and education, have rotted. Very much a case of the fish rotting from the head.
Idiotiotic and irrelevant research has always been part of university ‘research’ but it seems to be more prevelent these days.
Maybe that is just my feeling, but I suspect others with greater expertise might have a similar opinion.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Morrison bunch of no-hopers to do anything.
They can’t.
Wrong Jody…. sigh …. again
Trump has control of the agenda.
As for young people … check out the audiences at his rallies.
There are quite a few younge people at them.
Also young people in Australia, young people with degrees, are disillusioned with their education. They see a lifetime of menial jobs because their degrees are worth crap.
Don’t confine yourself to the narrow narrative of your managerial elite class.
The world is returning to what worked in the past. It is only you managerial class elites who wish it wasn’t.
It is you and your mates who sink to personal attacks and tantrums.
Just look at how often you abuse me for pointing out what is now becoming a self evident truth (see John O’Sullivans article) and see how often you start YELLING in your rants.
And you reckon you know what’s going on.
What a joke but it is good you realize the past, before the dominance of you managerial elites, was in fact glorious.
You over estimate the influence of those elitists who taugh and teach. No matter how skilled you people are or how much you think you know, young people will think for themselves and reject things they see as not beneficial to themselves.
And that is happening.
Trump is leading the world to reduce the swamp creatures, the elites, to an irrelevant, violent, ranting, screeching rump.
Cheers Jody