Whitehall “braced for private schools collapse” 6

[ICouldBeVioletSky]

Continuation of previous threads to discuss VAT on independent school fees.

You cannot technically “save lives” - everyone dies. You can only prolong life. Not all prolonging life is about acute medical need. Even in medicine, most of it is preventative. Education tends to promote better health which tends to increase life expectancy. And it is not just about living longer, it is a question of living longer in relatively good health. Wealth and Education leads to people making better choices.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mortality-insights-from-gad-december-2024/mortality-insights-from-gad-december-2024

The job of Government is to inform people to make good choices on behalf of their children, families and themselves.
Technology again is there to help people make better choices. The more educated people are using technology in better ways already.

Absolutely, @Araminta1003

That STEM program might inspire young people to become the scientists who will develop the next generation of cancer drugs in 20 years time, both prolonging and improving quality of life for many.

So just putting all government funding into the NHS for more operations, more expensive drugs - for all patients now - probably isn't the most effective use of state funds. Even if your only goal is 'saving a human life'.

All choices involve engaging with uncertainty - and tools like economics help us to do that with better results (whatever your goal).

i wasn’t talking about government policy. I was referring to your musings about your hypothetical totem pole of what’s important. In your view that seems to be only that which can be measured accurately or inaccurately in £. I am also glad your thought processes are contained to internet randomness and that you don’t work in government policy.

And where does the importance of funding music fit into this?

Anyone who wants to tax education is dumb, it’s an education tax FFS. It’s just backward stupidity and spite, there really isn’t anything else to it. Closing down schools so someone is motivated to look after you when you’re old?!? Madness

Hence us being pretty much alone in voting for it.

Seems like with a bit of self reflection you can answer your own question given you have made this point repeatedly across multiple boards.

Music is good for mental health and cohesion, whether classical or contemporary.
Some evolutionary theorists emphasise that one central function of music is to mobilise social cohesion and to improve mental health and subjective well-being.
Countless essays and books are written on the importance of Music and Art.

And despite @Newbutoldfather comment of subsidy I do have 2 world famous musicians in my much wider family who have contributed taxes into the many many millions in this country alone. So it is not all subsidised, far from it.

Brexit, education tax…I think they’d vote for a policy to get hit in the head with a hammer once a month as long as their neighbours children also got hit.

Taxing private schools makes good state school access more expensive as well.
Given the HENRYs fund a lot of our services, it is a relevant consideration, politically as well.
You only need 100k Henrys to adjust behaviour significantly by leaving the country or changing their work patterns, and public finances are utterly screwed.

So it is a risky policy fiscally as well. You cannot predict human behaviour adequately - especially in the social media era. They can all communicate and gang up with each other. Despite all the bleeding hearts on here as well telling higher earners to get a grip, many are annoyed at the return on their labour and the disproportionate burden placed on them and their families to carry the rest of society now.

Go read the Henrys posts on Reddit to get more of an idea. It is an overlooked but fiscally significant group. They largely value Education, includes good state education as well. They understand the importance of it.

Nobody said music lessons are specifically subsidised but the arts are. My point is that music is clearly something of much value to you if you are prepared to leave the country for it but can you attribute a value to it using StrawberryB's £ quantification logic. I don't think so given your answer.

@KendricksGin - what exactly is your question. The value of the music industry in the UK is currently at almost 8 billion per annum. With approximately 216000 jobs.
AI is identified as a threat, but it is currently a growing industry.

Only 2 out of 4 of my DC are interested in a musical pathway. I already have a Maths tech kid in Switzerland, like I said. My job is to identify the best opportunities for them in the most cost effective way for me. As the talented and young appear to be more valued in some other countries than they would be here, both politically and economically, that is a rationale trajectory to take, on an individual level. Until the politicians here rebalance their priorities. Which I am confident they will have to, in the long run.

My question was how do you quantify the value of the benefits you stated.

"Music is good for mental health and cohesion, whether classical or contemporary.
Some evolutionary theorists emphasise that one central function of music is to mobilise social cohesion and to improve mental health and subjective well-being.
Countless essays and books are written on the importance of Music and Art."

Rhetorical question really. The answer is that you can't and not everything falls neatly into little boxes and econometrics.

But the point is that it all comes down to choices we make - either personal choices (whether to support a premier league team with expensive tickets or a smaller team) or government policy (the government making the choice - on our behalf - to increase tax.. to give more funding to the NHS.. which means that each taxpayer must choose what they now won't buy from their now-reduced disposable income).

In personal choices, we're led by 'what we want'. Make no mistake, you're still judging what's important to you: but on a small personal scale you can get away with doing that intuitively.

But it doesn't scale. When we are analysing policy (as we are on this thread) - or when a government makes that policy- you need to be a bit more deliberate about it..

Yes obviously you need to scale. But the fact remains that not everything fits into the neat little 'how many people does it affect x the measured impact." Thankfully, things are considerably more sophisticated and nuanced than that.

Of course they are, but you seem to be suggesting that there should be no analysis at all. That some things are so precious that we shouldn't even try to quantify them - or justify expenditure on them - or even compare the value they bring us to the value other things bring us in any way.

And that's just a cop out.

And like I said, it's not to do with money, it's to do with choices. It's just that money is the main mechanism we use to buy the things we choose. And it's numeric, which is handy when it comes to comparisons.

The question is always: what do people value more?

Eg
a) the extra % chance they have of surviving cancer (if they get it) if the government increases NHS funding by £x amount, funded through increased income tax?

b) Or the things they would buy with the extra disposable income they keep if the government doesn't increase income tax?

You have to quantify it somehow, in order to evaluate options.

In the UK we do put a value of 'life' in the form of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) when evaluating the value for money of health interventions. NICE use this to judge the value of new medicines, and will turn down drugs where the cost per QALY is too high. Similarly we look at not only prolonging life, but quality of life - an intervention that prolongs life but with very low quality of life wouldn't be deemed a success.
Typically an acceptable QALY is £20000 to 30000 max, rising to £50000 for treatment of terminal illness and for highly specialised treatment of rare diseases up to £100000 (or more depending on disease severity, impact of intervention and other modifying factors)
Quantifying the human benefit of the arts would be much more difficult and subjective - I hear making a living in the arts is even harder than being a scientist (which is pretty precarious, grant dependent and a string of short term contracts for most people)

Not sure what any of this has to do with private schools though.

It has nothing at all to do with VAT on school fees. It is simply general and over-simplified musings of some invested parties when there is nothing else to report on the topic. Roll on the outcome of the court case!

I think a general discussions of the values and prioritise a particular country has, as compared to other countries in near geographical vicinity, is relevant because it says something about the value system of that country and its likely future trajectory.
For those of us who felt European, it is a most relevant question, the dawning realisation that this country is far more US style in its thinking, that much of mainland Europe, in that Education is simply not valued as much.

@Araminta1003 ,

That is such a Eurocentric view.

Why is the U.S so much richer than the EU? Why do they dominate high tech industry?

It is not just their education and they do have more inequality, but the idea that the U.S value education less than the EU is ridiculous.

I presume you are talking about a Trump-free US, here? 🤣

The high tech and inequality ie Gini coefficient you mentioned earlier I do wonder if they go hand in hand.

I mean you reward risk taking and innovation which is good. But the coefficient is higher.

The problem with the question being what people value more is that they may value one thing more, personally, but not appreciate the consequences of everyone making the same personal choices, or prioritising the same things. This is particularly the case because people never only value one thing, but they do have to decide what to prioritise, and to miss out on some things that they value altogether, or enjoy them less frequently than they would like. For example, everyone might find Amazon convenient and cheap, or Shein, but then when local businesses that couldn’t compete start going bust, they don’t like losing their jobs, or boarded up shops, or an eventual diminution in choices - but they didn’t change their behaviour, because they were only an individual, so didn’t think their individual choices would make a difference to anything. And sometimes, of course, it isn’t really so much an active, thought-out choice they have made as a situation they have been manipulated into until they are a captive audience.

"I don't want to make choices for other people " buuut they don't know the consequences of their choices! I know best!

You are a short step from collective farming and plummeting standards of living, comrade.

And don't think they won't put you in the gulag too (obviously I'll be put there first)