Universities follow perverse incentive models out of touch with the labour market July 6, 2022 THE days tick by to the summer ritual of the announcement of A-level results. Yet panic is already spreading among those wanting to start university in the autumn. The number of applicants has risen by 5 per cent this year, according to the university admissions service (UCAS). In addition, many universities are cutting back the [...]
A recession will tempt firms into short-term cuts and sacrifice of future growth July 6, 2022 Throughout the history of recessions and periods of high inflation, when businesses have felt compelled to cut back to protect their margins, they’ve often looked at marketing spend with a raised eyebrow. It’s usually one of the biggest line items and certainly one of the easiest to cut. It’s a deep shame, therefore, it has [...]
Letters: Sturgeon’s self-defeating fight July 6, 2022 [Re: Scottish independence is Sturgeon’s long game and a useful smokescreen, July 4] It strikes me that one of the best ways to argue against the case for a Referendum on Scottish Independence is to use First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s own logic against her. If Scotland, as an administrative part of the United Kingdom, was [...]
Explainer-in-brief: the state of play of NHS backlogs July 5, 2022 Backlogs affecting every aspect of care – from GP appointments to hospital treatment – plague the NHS. Around 6.4 million patients are waiting to start hospital treatment in England. In other words, ten per cent of the population are in line for treatment. According to the latest figures by NHS England, there are 2.48 million [...]
Waitlists, ambulance delays, a looming GP strike? It must be the NHS’ birthday July 5, 2022 So, happy birthday, NHS. It’s not every day a national health service turns 74, is it? And what a way to celebrate, after making it through the pandemic, doctors and nurses are threatening to strike, backlogs are getting worse and worse, and people are hopping in their cars to get to A&E because an ambulance [...]
Privacy, please. Demand for phone booths is a sign the open-plan working craze is over July 5, 2022 Collaborative space in offices has been in vogue for some time now. The demand for open plan offices was behind the creation of thousands of co-working companies. You’ve heard the phrases: bumping into colleagues, water cooler chats, office banter – all the things we missed in the office. But whether people are in the office [...]
Renewables haven’t pushed prices down because we haven’t learned to use them July 5, 2022 WIND and solar technologies promised us “power from thin air”: zero marginal cost generation to lower energy bills and carbon emissions in step. Yet today, as renewable records continue to roll in, they seem to have done little to assuage rocketing power prices. It’s not that renewables were a bad bet. In fact, they remain [...]
Explainer-in-brief: What is the legal basis for a new Scottish ballot? July 4, 2022 Nicola Sturgeon has chosen the date for a second referendum on independence: 9 October 2023. The question will have the exact same phrasing that was used in 2014 – when 45 per cent voted for independence and 55 per cent voted against it: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” The question of independence came up [...]
Scottish independence is Sturgeon’s long game and a useful smokescreen July 4, 2022 Last week, the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, laid out her plans for the latest attempt to separate the United Kingdom. In a statement to the Scottish Parliament which was long on wishful thinking and short on legal technicalities, she announced that the “proposed” date of another referendum on independence would be 19 October [...]
Friedman served us well, but now it’s time to challenge his view of corporate purpose July 4, 2022 THE traditionally-accepted purpose of a business, as famously espoused by Milton Freidman, has been to earn a profit for its owners or shareholders. This concept stood for many years as fundamental and non-negotiable. The investment world has historically been managed on two dimensions: risk and return. For an investor, the question has typically been: how [...]