Saturday 12 August 2017

Tory MP nails it.

From The Daily Mail:

Tory MP brands British universities 'self-serving cartels' as he quits Bath over vice-chancellor's £450,000-a-year paycheck

8 comments:

Bayard said...

Thoughts about the Pope and Catholicism spring to mind.

DBC Reed said...

Clear case of Management Capture.

Lola said...

DBCR Isn't it Producer Capture?

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, L, management capture, producer capture, regulatory capture, whatever, it's clearly "rent seeking" in the wider sense.

DBC Reed said...

MW
Quite, but I am not sure that Georgism has the answer.I know from ex students of mine of a recently privatised public service , where the management has cherry pricked all the good jobs and incorporated them into their own "roles"then sacked the discards or reduced their pay by £9,000 p.a. This is particularly depraved behaviour but there is nothing the workers can do about it.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, the income is rental income do can be taxed at very high rates, I suggest 90%.

Lola said...

MW / DBCR. A large part of the efficiency of Georgism and CI is to remove the opportunity for rent seeking, both as to actual land rents and the 'rents' enjoyed by egregious self-serving shits like the above named vice. Since CI plus education vouchers plus no preventing of topping up would mean that students would be pretty keen on value for money when buying their education. The vice above only gets what she gets because she is effectively utterly unaccountable and her pay is set by those who want to fish in the same pool as she does at some time. I have a mate who was a Vice Chancellor at a major London New University who made this point to me. As does his brother who was also in FE.

DBC Reed said...

@L
NB I wasn't talking about an educational establishment but the same lesson applies: the Anna Soubry (sp?)observation about BBC pay . She said in the heat of the moment that fiddling with pay grades was the result of deunionisation.She had been the "mother of a chapel"in some media set-up and had kept, in her words, "a very beady eye" on the pattern of pay agreements.The sooner we get back to the post war consensus the better. As a conservative I am sure you agree!
( At the workplace in question some skilled jobs have disappeared into the clutches of untrained management whose hourly rate is twice what the original workers were getting.)