Pie Fight

Welcome to the schmuck of the day club

Today's schmuck of the day club inductee is medical student Alex Thomas, who whines

The constant analysis of GPs' salaries is really starting to irritate me. If the public think it is such an easy ride being a GP, why aren't there more of them applying for the job themselves?

[...]

in addition to A grades in chemistry and biology, applicants may have to be able to discuss Proust or be almost fluent in Spanish or be able to quote extensively from Chaucer, in the original Middle English.

Does this sound easy so far?

Erm, do you sound like a twat so far, Mr Proust Discusser?

So irksome did I find Mr Thomas that I: a) launched the Schmuck of the day club; B) started blogging again; and C) overcame my usual lethargy and wrote a letter to the (Guardian) editor. Well done, Alex - just the cure! Here's that letter:

Let’s hope that medical student Alex Thomas ( Fancy becoming another one of those overpaid GPs?, 17 August) is better at reading patients’ symptoms than he is at plain old reading. In complaining that the public believes that GPs are overpaid and that their job is easy, he is erecting a straw man: the vast majority of the public don’t think being a GP is easy. We do, however, think they are getting a jammy deal. Just because a job is hard and demands great commitment doesn’t mean it should command a six-figure salary, particularly when nurses, whose job is at least as hard as a GPs, are so poorly remunerated.

This advice strikes me as so demanding as to be counter-productive

New health advice:

The new guidelines say:

· 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day is still the minimum, but vigorous as opposed to moderate activity should be "explicitly" recommended

· Combining days of moderate exercise with other days of vigorous exercise is better for you

· Moderate exercise should be in addition to daily activities such as casual walking, shopping or taking out the rubbish

· People should do two weight-training sessions a week

I would imagine that this would help dissuade many people from bothering to do even moderate exercise, since they'll reason that it's not enough.

More money, less control

The very good Mike Baker of the BBC writes:

As Blair departs, many will hope for an end to "initiative-itis" and policy overload. No more targets. No more bully-pulpit politics. No more "modernising" of the comprehensives. But they will be disappointed. Gordon Brown is just as fond of targets. He will insist on a something-for-something return for every extra pound that goes to education.

In a recent interview, he told me education would be "my passion ... my priority". The big question for Brown is: why, after so much more investment, do teachers, lecturers and parents still feel dissatisfied?

I think Julian Le Grand's "knights and knaves" work answers that final question.

Miss, that little boy crumpled on the ground over there pushed me

At least once a week now, the Guardian has a column bemoaning the cruelty and arrogance of atheists, and the dire lot of the religious in this country. For example, Madeline Bunting recently railed against outspoken atheists such as Richard Dawkins.

Don't get me wrong, I think Dawkins is a bore. But when they criticism him and his anti-religion ilk, Bunting and the burgeoning religious crew writing inthe Guardian appear to operate under the fallacy that it's only the anti-religious lot who are attempting to impose their values, and that religion is a poor bullied weakling. Tell that to the gays, Madeline (famous apologist for homophobic Muslim clerics). And tell that to the 17-year-old girl in Ireland who the religious crew is trying to force to stay in Ireland and bring her baby to term, rather than go to England for a termination, even though the baby has no head, and is guaranteed to die within three days of birth. And tell it, Madeline, to the UK women unfortunate enough to have as a doctor one of the 40% of GPs who say they would refuse to refer a woman on for an abortion, on 'moral grounds'.

Religion has been imposing itself on the rest of us for thousands and thousands of years. Just because in a relatively enlightened country such as the UK it has less power to do so than before, doesn't mean it still isn't doing it all the time, and still trying to do it even more. Just because you take this for granted, Maddy, doesn't mean it isnt' happening. So enough with this silly notion that religion is the victim because a handful of verbal atheists are giving it a heckling. It's been bullying us for years, and isn't going to stop until we force it to.

Must read

Po Bronson's blog looks very interesting. And here is his Factbook on family.

Open to suggestion

Fun stuff from the Annals of Improbable Research: a study indicating that people are more conformist after being shown a photo of an accountant than after being shown a photo of a punk rocker.

The authority figure asked each of the confederates how many beeps they'd heard. Each of these co-conspirers gave a pre-arranged - and wrong - total.

Now, at long last, the innocent dupe had to speak up. How many beeps had she or he heard?

The innocent dupes who had seen the photo of an accountant fudged their answer. They acquiesced to what everyone else said. The dupes who had looked at a punk rocker did not.

Like many studies, this one builds on an existing foundation. Pendry and Carrick acknowledge owing much to a 1996 New York University study about innocent dupes who were shown a list of words about elderly people. The words included: old, lonely, grey, retired, wrinkle, ancient and cautious. The scientists, armed with a stopwatch, discovered that dupes who had seen those words walked away more slowly than dupes who had not.

How do politicians respond to the needs of the poor?

It's a trick question: they don't.

Larry Bartels of Princeton has recently studied the voting record of the Senate between 1989 and 1994--a time, note, when Democrats controlled Congress. He found that senators were very responsive to the preferences of the upper third of the income spectrum, somewhat less attentive to the middle third, and completely dismissive of the policy preferences of the poorest third. In one striking example, Bartels discovered that senators were likely to vote for a minimum wage increase only when their wealthier constituents favored it--the views of those directly affected by the hike had "no discernible impact."

Nor is this pattern limited to domestic policy. Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Benjamin Page of Northwestern have found that the foreign policy views of the executive and legislative branches are primarily influenced by business leaders, policy experts--whose think tanks are often funded by businesses--and, to a lesser extent, organized labor. Jacobs and Page found that the views of the broader public have essentially zero impact on the government when it comes to tariffs, treaties, diplomacy, or military action.

Rhetorically speaking

Kevin Drum defines the difference between cheap campaign rhetoric and serious campaign rhetoric:

No child should go without healthcare" is cheap rhetoric, something nobody disagrees with. "I think everyone over the age of 55 should be covered by Medicare" is serious rhetoric. It's not a 300-page white paper, but it clearly delineates a policy priority that not everyone else shares. "I think every man, woman, and child in the country should be covered by Medicare regardless of age" is really serious rhetoric.

Derision as political tool

Polly Toynbee nails this one. The right-wing press and think tanks repeatedly sneer at public sector jobs in an effort to discredit the public sector as a whole. But what is beneath the veneer of the roles they sneer at? Usually, a job that matters, even if it does have a stupid title. (Perhaps the HR brigade are secret rightists, trying to bring the state down from within.) And the Tory sneering shows a rather repulsive attraction to politics over substance.

The Tax Payers' Alliance has just produced its Annual Non-Job Report, adding up the ads in Society for one month. Naturally, the Tory press joins the attack with glee.... All this goes to the heart of Tory policy, persuading the electorate that tax money is always wasted, public jobs are pointless and the state should shrink. That is why the shadow paymaster general, Mark Francois, eagerly endorsed this report: "Taxpayers are becoming increasingly frustrated at having to fund politically correct jobs while they themselves are struggling to make ends meet."

Anyway, Polly goes through and looks beneath the occasionally silly titles to find out what the jobs actually do. Here are a few:

Here's its No 1 non-job: assistant director, wellbeing and community services. Hampshire county council, salary, up to £85,000. What's the job? Complete charge of a budget of £170m, delivering care services to 10,000 adults, the old, disabled and frail across all of Hampshire - which is, incidentally, Tory-controlled. They may think "wellbeing" sounds silly, but it is David Cameron's favourite word. Is £85,000 too much? I don't know in a world where Lord Browne has just left BP with £63m legally purloined from a public company holding all our pension funds.

No 2: programme manager for national Supporting People value improvement programme, Department of Communities and Local Government, salary £39,728-£53,144. This is an awful mouthful of a title, but what does it do? Supporting People is one the government's best programmes, doing what the Tories like - funding a host of charities, such as Homeless Link, that help 1.2 million people to live independently. They are old or mentally ill homeless people who risk falling back on to the streets. This job does what taxpayers ought to want - checks best value for money.

Echidne's guide to statistics

Talk about a public service: echidne's posted a six-part primer on statistics. Maybe I'll end up learning something from my quant analysis course after all.