Sam Bowman

Wednesday

Sam Bowman

Lord Freud was right and Miliband shameful

From our UK edition

Markets are amoral. If a severely disabled person cannot produce more than the minimum wage’s worth of work, no employer will be able to profitably employ them. Some generous ones might do so at a loss, but we cannot assume that there will be enough of them. Many severely disabled people who would like to work thus cannot do so. Lord Freud, a businessman turned welfare advisor to Tony Blair turned Tory minister, made this point at a fringe event at the recent Tory conference. He suggested that we could allow firms to employ severely disabled people at below the minimum wage. He also said we should use something like the Universal Credit financial-support scheme to make up the difference – although this has been much less widely reported.

Tuesday

Sam Bowman

The state should send many more poor children to private schools

From our UK edition

Better capital makes us richer. That's uncontroversial when it comes to fixed capital like machine tools and computers, but it's also true of human capital. Better educated workers create more productive jobs, increasing the total amount of wealth in an economy. In a new Adam Smith Institute report released today, Incentive to Invest: How education affects economic growth, we found a very significant relationship between improvements in education and growth. In our model, a 10 per cent increase in TIMSS Advanced test scores generates a long-term 0.85 per cent increase in annual economic growth. We argue that getting more children into independent schools through vouchers may be the easiest way of improving outcomes, and thus growth.

Monday

Sam Bowman

Cutting immigration won’t help youth unemployment

From our UK edition

Reading the papers today, you could be forgiven for thinking that MigrationWatch’s new report was a smoking gun against immigration. Here we have a study that links immigration to unemployment, in the face of nearly all previous research that has found no such link. However, looking at the MigrationWatch piece itself, it quickly becomes clear how implausible these claims are. The MigrationWatch report centres on a comparison of rising youth unemployment and rising immigration from the ‘A8’ countries – the Eastern European states that joined the EU in 2004. The correlation between the two is remarkably weak. During the initial rise in immigration between 2004 and the end of 2008, there is no significant rise in unemployment at all.

Thursday

Sam Bowman

The profit motive would boost Gove’s Free Schools agenda

From our UK edition

The promise of Michael Gove’s Free Schools programme — as distinct from his Academies programme — is slow to materialise. What seemed like the government’s most radical and important reform has stalled as expected take-up has fallen far short of expectations. 350,000 new school places are required to meet increasing demand by 2015 — to address this, the Conservatives had set their sights on setting up 3,000 new Free Schools in nine years. But, so far, there have been just 323 applications, with only a handful due to open in September 2011, and the DfE capital budget is set to fall by 60 per cent to £3.4 billion by 2014-15. This constitutes a massive capital shortfall. A storm is gathering in education.

Thursday

Sam Bowman

International aid should be abolished

From our UK edition

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015. It undermines the narrative that the country will be suffering the cuts together and shows a tone-deafness in cutting spending at home while increasing it abroad. But worse, it exacerbates the problem that development aid does an immense amount of harm to the developing world, and this spending increase will only make things worse.