Posts by Keir Leslie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Here's something to think about: the NZ legal system is world-class, if not world beating. It provides very high quality, unimpeachably fair dispute resolution at very very reasonable rates, using a sophisticated common law model that allows for easy interaction with most other Anglophone nations. In particular, there's close interoperability with Australian, Canadian, and English law. Why shouldn't we focus on that world class industry, instead of focussing on engineering, where, quite frankly, we haven't a hope of competing with the big boys?
(I am very indebted to Daniel Davies' argument that the greatest natural resources of Britain are the common law and the English language in that order.)
-
Let’s only have rich scientists!
Yeah, that is somewhat of a downside, although no doubt scholarships and suchlike will be available for the bright but poor. But that's not an economic problem --- which is how people are attempting to justify these policies.
-
When you look to see where those really bright stage I students went, they went to one of the high paid professions.
Again, what? Comparing a PhD working in CRI to a lawyer in private practice is so not apples to apples it's mad. PhD lawyers working in academia will be on similar salaries. (It's also total goalpost shifting to go from `engineers and scientists are paid many times less than lawyers' to `certain government employed scientists are paid less than lawyers'. CRIs are also noticeably stingy employees. I am sure you could find trades union lawyers or on pretty much nothing.
If there are insufficient jobs for the scientists produced, and there are falling numbers of science students, that seems like a problem that will solve itself.
And given that we subsidise undergrad science degrees to the tune of $30,000, and you seem to think that there's an overproduction of science degrees, I would suggest killing the subsidy and letting the universities set fees at market rates would help with that.
-
I don't need market perfection, I just need to be able to say that the market accurately reflect participant's views on value, which handily! we have basically defined as tautologically true. More importantly, I really don't think that there is a huge market failure in the market for legal services or engineering services. If there is, you could probably make a killing by exploiting that.
(It's all a bit hypothetical anyway given that lawyers are not really paid more than engineers, which was the reason for the digression.)
-
I should add that the difference between the international price and the NZ price is interesting because it can be thought of as measuring the distortion caused to the market in degrees by government intervention. Not all of that is paid directly by the government, but it does represent a cost to NZ.
The direct government subsidy* is still important to consider. If you do science or engineering, the government is willing to give you roughly four grand a year more than if you're doing law. Why? Why do we do that? Shouldn't we pass that cost on to the student, reflecting the fact that training people in engineering and science is expensive?
* which ignores various inequities in terms of research and grant and etc funding.
-
No, I think it does. People make decisions about how much they are willing to pay for services. Lots and lots of those decisions go to making up the market for engineering and legal services. And while you might argue that objectively, lawyers aren't worth as much as engineers or wevs, it turns out that the market takes a certain view, and fundamentally we do have a market economy.
-
Not true. Pay for NZ lawyers is, generously, averaging around the $150,000 mark. If you think most engineers out there are on less than $50,000, then you are mad. Pay in engineering is in fact roughly comparable to pay in law.
Even if it were true that engineers were paid many times less then lawyers, that would be because people think lawyers are more valuable than engineers.
-
I found the Finnish thing kinda strange, to be honest.
-
We do, and they get the bulk of the Marsden money, but that still doesn’t mean that there are jobs waiting for them at the end of their degree.
Which suggests to me we have a structural oversupply of scientists. Instead of spending more money on science education, we should start spending less, and wait for the market to equalise. It's econ 101.
-
Even if they are Veblen* doesn't really matter, it's the difference between that market and the subsidised cost that we care about. (After all, presumably if the government let the cost float we would end up with the same price for NZ & int'l students.)
The whole thing is pretty rough, because fees aren't just held down by subsidies, the subsidies won't explain the whole difference (some will be profit margin which should be steadyish across the board but prob. isn't) but of course that's not the point. The point is that there is an undeniable and massive subsidy going towards engineering (and the sciences to a much less extent.)
(Law should be $5,243 for NZ students above by the way.)
(* Doubt they are Veblen though, I suspect in fact positional at most.)