Monday, April 19, 2010
Thought experiment
Or a trick question. In what follows isolated upper case letters denote scalar parameters taking positive values.
We suppose that we live in a class ridden country containing persons of two classes, 1 and 2. Class 1 is also called the middle class. Class 2 used to be called working class because they did all the work. We further suppose that we aspire to a classless society with everybody in class 1, thus abolishing the working class. Presently, class 1 contains A people and class 2 contains B people. We suppose that the reproductive and migration arrangements are such that the total population does not change over time. We have decided that the route to this utopia is through education (which is a well known to be a determinant of the class of children) and we have identified two options. Option 1 says that we have posh schools which take a random C% of the children from class 1 and a random D% from class 2. If you go to a posh school you have an E% chance of being assigned to class 1 on graduation. E is supposed to be reasonably near 100. Otherwise you are assigned to the class of your mother. Option 2 says that we have bog standard schools which take everyone. If you go to a bog standard school you have an F% chance of being assigned to class 1 on graduation. F is supposed to be significantly less than E. Otherwise you are assigned to the class of your father.
So the thought experiment, open to basic excel basic users, is to model the behaviours of these two systems.
Question 1: given the parameters, which system will result more quickly in the extermination of the working class? Will either result in the extermination of the middle class?
Question 2: identify interesting variations of the input parameters.
Question 3: identify interesting variations of the model. For example, one might extend the model to variations in the amount of cross breeding.
My guess is that a basic excel basic user could do some useful analysis in a couple of days, including time for research on the starting position. Does the much loved Mr Balls, in charge of our education system, find the time to have people do this sort of thing? Would he tell us the answer if he did? Sadly, I am not sure that I can spare two days just now.
All prompted by the claim in one of the national newspapers, perhaps passing on the thoughts of one of our movers and shakers, that the grammar school system moved more people out of the working class than the comprehensive system does now, after making due allowance for changes in demographics and so on and so forth. Not a trivial calculation in itself.
Which may well be so, but my pseudo-grammar school education did not teach me how to spell grammar. Mr G. has to correct me every time.
I should perhaps add that, to my mind, maximising class promotion in this rather narrow sense is not the only point of education. Grammar schools would not, by winning this particular race, kill off the comprehensives. But study of such races can usefully inform policy. The snag is that we, collectively, are rather inclined to used such studies in a rather crude way. But this is not sufficient reason for not doing them.
PS: interesting, if small, apercu on the workings of elections. I was prompted by the 'Dignity in Dying' people (http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/) to send postcards to my parliamentary candidates asking them for their views on these dying matters. Our sitting member, Chris Grayling, the former television journalist who is now a conservative, could be reached through his office in the House of Commons. Mr G. was not revealing any more local address. The other two candidates, being nonentities at this point in the process, had to make do with what looked liked their home addresses. Or perhaps those of their agents.
I thought it unlikely that the postcard to Chris Grayling would reach its destination. As it turns out, his organisation was the first with a reply, cunningly crafted to look as if the man himself had scrawled on it before despatch. Maybe he did. The answer itself is reasonable, if not agreeing with my position that we should not have to troll over to Switzerland when we have had enough. Was the answer hand crafted, or does the organisation have stock answers for all the many campaigns of this sort? Are the answers supplied by head office? I guess that success breeds success, in that a big party can better afford the manufacture of nice answers to campaign postcards.
# posted by Jim @ 5:08 AM 
