Thus, the report's remit was "to examine the competitiveness of financial services globally and to develop a framework on which to base policy and initiatives to keep UK financial services competitive".If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. The right question is, instead, this: what framework is needed to ensure that the operation of the financial sector is compatible with the long-run health of the UK and world economies?
Thus, the report's remit was "to examine the competitiveness of financial services globally and to develop a framework on which to base policy and initiatives to keep UK financial services competitive".
If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. The right question is, instead, this: what framework is needed to ensure that the operation of the financial sector is compatible with the long-run health of the UK and world economies?
The mantra of competitiveness needs to be dropped more broadly than just in the context of UK financial services. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
The mantra of competitiveness needs to be dropped more broadly than just in the context of UK financial services.
I don't think so.
A shared surplus cooperative enterprise model operating 'Not for Loss' - in which there are no returns to rentiers - will out-compete the existing 'For Profit' model which does pay returns to rentiers.
So I'm all in favour of competition and turning the rhetoric upon its proponents. BloatedTM and UnproductiveTM rentiers are unnecessary and UncompetitiveTM. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
A shared surplus cooperative enterprise model operating 'Not for Loss'
value is only created by competitive industries
Does it really have to be pointed out how arbitrary that statement is? Do we really have to mention all the other value-creating human activities that have nothing to do with competitive industries? Do we really have to ask you to show (without reflexive reference to Soviet this or that) that competition in industry is essential to value creation?
Or is this perhaps leading to a fundamental discussion about the meaning of "value"?
That is, efficient schools and hospitals are certainly not excluded from the definition of "competitive industries". Indeed, hospitals will indeed compete (and are already competing) with each other for patients to a much larger degree than they used to because of the new EU rules which give patiens the right to get tax-financed care in other member states. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Patients don't want choice or competition. Patients want health care.
The attempt to impose competitive values in the UK has been a disaster. It's created a useless class of paper pushers who think they know more about hospital management than front line staff do, and who are more interested in 'competition' than in service.
This has wasted huge sums of money for very little gain in service quality.
The problem with the concept of 'competition' - apart from its reflexive bow to Darwinian eugenics - is that it implies low costs and high profits. It says nothing about quality of service. And in a captive market owned by large corporates, quality of service is the first thing to suffer.
So 'competition' isn't any more efficient at value creation than a completely state managed economy would be. It's better at advertising and PR, and it's better at profit extraction. But it's not inherently better at getting the job done - unless you have very specialised and rare market conditions.
Can't get that hip replacemnt done in time? Go to Poland and send the bill to the same guys who finance your local hospital. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Can't get that hip replacemnt done in time? Go to Poland and send the bill to the same guys who finance your local hospital.
"It's not our fault you can't afford to travel abroad for medical treatment". The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Socialize the costs, privatize the profits. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
With health care, you get what you pay for, in the sense that it cannot be cheap and (consistently) good. It can be expensive and bad, of course, but that's true for everything...
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
If it's still cheaper and with no waiting times, it's in everyones best interest.
What's happening is that certain industries move to where they have an absolute advantage. To make it perfectly clear: if foreigners start going to Poland it will increase the budgets of the Polish healthcare system to compensate for the increased load, ie more doctors and nurses can be hired. It might even increase the quality of the local care as it is likely that the Poles can demand higher payment from Swedes than from Poles, and it will still be cheaper overall.
In the long run it won't work like that of course, as Polish wages will catch up with those in Sweden, but then in the long run we are all dead. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
In the meantime, a single doctor has only so many hours in the day and if he spends it with one patient, then another patient must wait. Unless of course he doesn't have a full schedule. Are you suggesting that Polish doctors are underworked? -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
To make it perfectly clear: if foreigners start going to Poland it will increase the budgets of the Polish healthcare system to compensate for the increased load, ie more doctors and nurses can be hired.
It's just as likely that the Polish healthcare system will keep the extra cash.
Increase in income only translates to increase in investment if rentiers/governments aren't greedy and stupid, there's someone capable and competent to make the strategic decision, and there's a reasonable chance the change will be lasting enough to make it worth doing, and that there's a body of out of work doctors immediately available - or at least hire-able from abroad.
If any of those are marginal, it won't happen.
Meantime, nothing guarantees Poles benefit from this situation. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
If lots of people don't want to go to a certain hospital it will lose money. Problem? Nope. It will lose money for a good reason then, because it's not delivering what patients want, and it'll have to adapt or downsize. This is a good thing as it will force inefficient hospitals to work better. It's kind of what competition is all about: forcing inefficient facilities to become more efficient, or lose their customers. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Your model would condemn an underclass to substandard health care by abandoning the commitment to uniformly good public health provision.
And by "uniformly good" I don't mean that everything should be the same, but that everyone should have access to a local facility of a certain minimum standard.
You reason as if health care were a consumer good, or a lifestyle service - no different from hairdressers... The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Also, observe that it's not just the kids who're put into private schools who become better off, but the ones who stay in the improving public schools are also better off.
Personally I went to public schools. One was horrible, one was semi-good, and one was excellent.
In the best of worlds (ie Finland) we would only have public schools, and they would all be great. But just like when it comes to our healthcare system, such an outcome is impossible for political reasons, and this is the second best alternative. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
At least in our system, each pupil has a check, kind of. This check is given to the school of the pupils choice. There's no other mode of financing the schools. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I don't know what you call that, but I call it cream skimming.
And really... the best school I went to was when I was 16-18. It was an inner city school with great reputation, long history, and so on. So was the most horrible school I went to, when I was 7-11 years old. And the semi-good one, when I was 12-15. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
My fear is that the people who make the rules will be from the part of the system that think in terms of international trade, rather than the parts of the system that think in terms of health care quality and social policy. Because, on the record, the international trade types seem to neither know nor care when their ideology imposes some regulation that is not technology- or public/private neutral.
In other words, stop repeating that government cannot do the job and focus on actually doing the job. It works in many sectors and many countries. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
"I do not understand that people who preach a social Europe do not want to give patients the right to get the treatment they need. Is it social to vote against legislation that benefits the European citizen in a concrete way? This is not about liberalisation of health care services, but about free movement of patients. The directive will not interfere in the way national health care systems are organised. They are playing political games on the backs of European patients."
How do we prevent member states underfunding their public health system and thus freeloading on their neighbours?
Member states will find that health care becomes a form of tourism - visit of relatives etc. & will have an inventive to improve health care.
Member states will find that health care becomes a form of tourism
[head explodes]
Medic!
people have travelled for health, spiritual through pilgrimages, and physical, spa cures.
people even go for a summer beach holiday for their health, on some level.
so travel and health are joined at the hip already, the cheap flights/globalisation thingy has just upped the ante considerably.
it's nothing new, or particularly dramatic, look how may stateside go to mexico for operations, or euros even going as far as thailand for dentistry.
not to denigrate the valid points you're making, just that there is more than one side to the issue, if people want to go somewhere nice and have a holiday, returning with a new nose or choppers (!), it's going to be pretty hard to legislate that into extinction. ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
It's missing the point that essential healthcare which isn't available locally might as well not exist.
If I have a heart attack I don't want to be waiting for a doctor to helicopter over from Poland. Likewise if I sprain my foot, I shouldn't have to fly to France for an x-ray.
It doesn't matter how good or 'competitive' these non-UK services are - if they're not immediately available, they'no use to me.
And as an aside, if you implement the kind of system where the country you are treated in sends the bill to the country you live in, you run into all kinds of issues. In Poland, for instance, abortion is illegal. In Denmark, it's a fairly routine operation. The Polish authorities might understandably be a tad - ah - miffed, shall we say, that Denmark not only subverts their regulations, it would also be able to bill them for it.
Now, in the particular case of abortion, I happen to think that Poland should sit down, shut up and pretend to be civilised. But suppose that Luxembourg decides that it would be profitable to do chelation therapy for autism, or British lobbyists start pushing the UK as a flag of convenience country for scams like homeopathy?
Should they be able to start a carry trade of people who go there to get free quackery that they'd otherwise have to pay for because their home state doesn't want to sponsor bullshit pseudo-medicine? And then send the bills (along with the bother and cost of dealing with the inevitable complications of using quacks their nostrums instead of real medicine) back to the patients' home countries?
And if you don't allow countries to claim reimbursement for procedures that are not reimbursed in the country they were going to bill, you risk a race to the bottom, where the countries with free, universal health care may end up supporting the cream skimming for-profit health care system of less responsible countries. And if you allow countries to refuse to pay for procedures that they can't be reimbursed for... well, there went the whole mobility of health care thingy...
In short, there's a number of highly non-trivial issues here that need to be fleshed out, and appeals to "competition" strike me as being more an example of the belief in the power of incantation than in the power of evidence.
There are several ways to say "fuck you." That is one of them.
make sure that your healthcare system [...] works
And because of the impossibility of reform, instead of having a sound tax-financed system with a mix of private and public care institutions we have gotten one which desperately tries to block all private alternatives, but which allows privately financed health insurance with which you can skip the lines in both public hospitals and the handful or private ones they haven't manage to stop.
Marvelous, innit? Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
There is actually a wide variety of approaches to health care in Europe (and the industrialised world in general.)
Many mix public and private institutions, many have private health insurance systems in parallel to state funding.
While none are as inefficient as the "privatised" american system, all of them, from the market-liberal Germans to completely state controlled Norwegians, are being squeezed by rising costs.
The fact is, people get older as we get more and more treatments and a more efficient health care system.
Hospitals hold the ultimate captive market. The better they work the more customers they have.
Moving the deck chairs around isn't going to unsink the Titanic. If you want a better functioning health care system you have to increase the funding or stop treating people.
Hospitals hold the ultimate captive market. The better they work the more customers they have. Moving the deck chairs around isn't going to unsink the Titanic. If you want a better functioning health care system you have to increase the funding or stop treating people.
heh, i would have thought the better the hospital, the faster they'd move the customers out.
till the common wisdom about diet changes, and it's easier -and cheaper- to get a soyburger than a dead cowburger, no amount of deck chair repositioning is ever going to work efficiently, let alone keep pace with boomer aging.
last week they arrested nurses in america for protesting the absence of any single payer plan, health providers are heartily p-o'd that they have insurance companies ruling how they treat patients.
her in yurp it's better, but hospitals remain germ traps, and doctors aren't thrilled with the arrangements, all the while working ridiculous hours guaranteed to cause burnout. ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
The real world may be a little bit more complicated than that.
"strong value-creating industries" can exist in an economy where "competitive" is not the only criteria in use.
And value is only created by competitive industries.
You are making no sense. You're positing a binary choice between a total focus on "competitive" industries and total economic apocalypse. The real world may be a little bit more complicated than that.
And value is only created by competitive industries. What?
What?
But if you can't make things people want to buy, there isn't going to be any money for generous unemployment benefits or pensions.
Well, quite. And this is almost exactly what's just happened.
But (retail) banking should not be competitive. It should work. Rail service should not be competitive. It should work. Water and electricity should not be competitive. It should work. And the telecom backbone should not be competitive. It should work.
99 % of the time, giving priority to "it should work" over "it should be competitive" means that it will be more expensive. But it also means that you avoid hitting the last one percent where some critical infrastructure blows up in your face and incurs an overhead comparable to your GDP.
Furthermore, the grid is a far more technical and capital intensive (ie. less people intensive) business than say hospitals, and hence it lends itself better to centralised state control and monopoly. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Deciding where the most efficient new and rebuilt lines and substations, as well as who's going to pay, hasn't been managed well by the current state of affairs. for example, excellent wind projects in California have been waiting for over a decade! for transmission issues to be resolved.
The grid, as a social necessity, needs to be managed centrally, with efficiency as the ultimate criteria. With appropriate oversight regulation of course. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
The grid, as a social necessity, needs to be managed centrally, with efficiency as the ultimate criteria.
There is a reasonable argument if the finer mesh of the grid is better managed by smaller and more nimble companies, and reasonable people can disagree over that. It's is probably heavily dependent on local characteristics. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
As J pointed out before, it was the incompetence, not the government or the system, hindered by the quarterly profit motive. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
By sheer repetition (of the above, plus the trumpeting that the profits reliably extracted by the shareholders of the private companies put in charge of the rent were a good thing), it worked.
But the fact is, the problem is not the government, it's the incompetence. And privatisation is not the only solution to that. Quite the opposite: demonising the government further makes it worse, as fewer people want to work for government in the positions required to do the job. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Is it useful to be "competitive" without getting reward?
i don't see why one can't be competitive with oneself, and one's past performance, but leave it at that. it's healthy to challenge oneself by spurring sometimes, but making one's survival being competitive with others...well how is that better than feral? we'll never get rid of competition, but we could re-channel it, for example countries vying to become more ecologically responsible, i wouldn't mind seeing the competitive spirit exploited more in that regard! competitive spirit can ruin relationships, brotherhoods, atmospheres, even creativity. collaboration is a much worthier entrainment, and not just _against some-thing or-one all the time... ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
we'll never get rid of competition, but we could re-channel it, for example countries vying to become more ecologically responsible, i wouldn't mind seeing the competitive spirit exploited more in that regard!
competitive spirit can ruin relationships, brotherhoods, atmospheres, even creativity. collaboration is a much worthier entrainment, and not just _against
I don't know if i understand your argument correctly, but economy is not about competition of survival. Production creates it's own demand and the more labour is done the higher is the productivity, the less there is impoverishment. Economy becomes survival game as a result of wealth distribution. When the fruits of labour and productivity provide wealth only to rentiers, the game starts. To those without access to rentier incomes.
Production creates it's own demand
That was the reason? But did how they explain depressions? No one seems to notice when it's coming? I believe Say's Law does not work, because production creates economic rent. Land price, finance bubbles, monopolies etc. Not only labour and capital costs. If it would be so, i believe Say's Law could be quite accurate?
I don't know if i understand your argument correctly, but economy is not about competition of survival.
when resources were abundant and the earth was underpopulated, competition evolved for quality. now as we enter a dearth of what we took for granted, economic competition is a wasteful luxury we can ill afford.
that was the point i was clumsily trying to make.
thanks for your comment, i believe we are in agreement. ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
