‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question

John Burn-Murdoch with another fine article in the FT.

“Britain’s university graduates are having a rough time of it. In 1999, the average graduate salary was 80 per cent more than their non-graduate counterpart; in the latest data this was down to just 45 per cent, and that’s before factoring in student loans. Adding insult to injury, the government has worsened the terms of the loans to ensure repayments don’t wither in line with salaries.

A common response is to blame simple economic inevitability. Today 41 per cent of Britain’s workers have a degree, up from 20 per cent in 1999, and if you increase the supply of something (graduates), you reduce its price (earnings). A more nuanced version argues that rather than imparting new skills, university education mainly serves to signal who the most skilled people already are, so expanding participation dilutes the average skill level of graduates, along with their average earnings. Either way, so the argument goes, earnings erosion was inevitable, the government should have anticipated it and graduates shouldn’t have been sold an economic fiction….

But there’s one problem: none of the above has happened in most other developed countries. In the US, college graduates today earn 92 per cent more than non graduates, up from 80 per cent in 1996, even as the share of people with a degree has climbed from 27 per cent to 40 per cent. Graduate earnings premiums have also held up or increased in the face of expanded enrolment everywhere from Canada to France, Spain and the Netherlands.”

One giant mess that will wreck the lives of many. All predicable. Cheap money, bums on seats, and a country that finds it hard to distinguish between being a spiv and a businessman/woman.

Britain’s worst political scandal of this century.

In February 2025 Peter Mandelson was asked by the Financial Times about his relationship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The soon-to-be British ambassador to America offered a forthright response. “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”

The Economist

It [Finland] has more heavy metal bands per capita than any other nation. In the far north, for the few days around the winter solstice, the sun does not rise.

Finland has been ranked the happiest country on Earth by the UN for the last eight years in a row. A world leader in childcare

?Causality (Link)

The Trump team went to Europe in a state of malign ignorance, exemplified by Trump saying during his Davos harangue that “without us, you’d all be speaking German.”

Most Swiss speak … German. Paul Krugman.

I guess the name says it all. US medicine.

Some generic drugs that go for $97 at Costco can cost $19,200 at a specialty mail order pharmacy run by a PBM. (Matt Stoller on Substack)

Smedley Butler – Wikipedia

In addition to his speeches to pacifist groups, he served from 1935 to 1937 as a spokesman for the American League Against War and Fascism.[67][68] In 1935, he wrote the exposé War Is a Racket, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject are summarized in the following passage from the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:[15]

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was an American major general in the United States Marine Corps, writer, anti-war activist, and whistleblower.

Ralph Towner, March 1, 1940 – January 18, 2026, died in Rome.

I first came across Ralph Towner’s name in an interview with Larry Corryell in NME, who described him —wait for it— as the world’s greatest guitarist! The interviewing journalist had never heard of him, so Coryell directed him to Weather Report’s 1972 album I Sing the Body Electric where Towner delivered an acoustic guitar solo on the track The Moors.

The first Towner album I bought was Diary, in around 1974. A track, called Icarus, featuring Towner playing both piano and guitar, got me hooked. Throughout his career he mainly played nylon-strung classical guitars and steel strung acoustics, but he was something very special with a 12-string— and he played it with the fingers. His ability to play against louder instruments has always shocked me.

Then there was the album Solstice (on ECM) in 1975. Jan Garbarak on saxophone, made other ’jazz’ seem dull and parochial, Jon Christensen on drums with a minimalist kit, and Eberhard Weber on double and electric bass (I once saw Eberhard play in a primary school one evening in Vienna). Two tracks, Oceanus and Nimbus demonstrate what I think were Towner’s unique set of musical and technical skills. Different style and genre, but it was like listening to Hendrix for the very first time.

Monday 12 December, 2026 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1

This below is from John Naughton’s blog and links to an interview in La Monde

JN: “This is a huge topic so I’ll be writing quite a lot on it in the next few weeks (JN writes). But for starters, here’s a pretty sobering account by one of the ICC judges who was sanctioned by Trump because the Court indicted Netanyahufor war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Judge:“It goes far beyond simply being banned from US territory”, he says. The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit any American individual or legal entity, any person or company, including their overseas subsidiaries, from providing me with services. All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed. For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent me an email canceling the reservation, citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you do not know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s.

Q: (La Monde): Is access to the banking system still possible?
Judge: Sanctions are even more intrusive in this area. There are banks, even non-American ones, that close the accounts of sanctioned individuals. Any banking transaction involving an American individual or company, or conducted in US dollars, or in a currency that uses the dollar for conversion, is prohibited. In practice, you are effectively blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system. On top of that, all payment systems are American: American Express, Visa, Mastercard. Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. American companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who serve justice in contemporary armed conflicts. These sanctions can last over a decade or even longer. Putting someone under sanctions creates a state of permanent anxiety and powerlessness, with the intent of discouragement.

JN: And all this can be done on the whim of an elected tyrant in Washington . Our world has changed radically: we now need a realistic appraisal of how that seismic shift affects us. En passant, a reader of Quentin’s blog wrote to him, quoting a Draft EU report which says that “92% of the West’s data are stored in the USA [and] 69% of Europe’s cloud market share is held by US companies”.

Lorin Lakasing is not convinced the glut of maternity inquiries will make services safer.

The terms of reference are too narrow and the investigators keep asking the wrong people the wrong questions. The Care Quality Commission widely regarded by frontline healthcare professionals as ‘completely unfit’ for purpose remains the ultimate judge and jury. We have major problems in relation to teaching, training, teamwork, mentorship, clinical autonomy, clinical risk management, implementation of safety strategies freedom to speak up and regulation. (Quoted in Private Eye 1666 page19 (2026) Medicine Balls.)

Maternity is where meaningful medical statistics began in the 19th century: maternal death rates, neonatal death rates and infant mortality rates. My rule of thumb is that maternity services are likely better than the rest of medical care — it is just we are more aware of theme. Shocking, I know, but NHS clinical care is frequently awful. The inquires are just play acting. ”The Purpose of the System is What It Does”

I wish I had said that

‘As Edward Thurlow, lord high chancellor of Great Britain, did when he said

“Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?” ↩