What is a role model?

The Independant, 27th of august

"Once admired, now reviled"

"Every day more details emerge. The fruit flown in from Paris. The wallpaper at a grand a roll. The private jets, the flunkeys, the "pleasure domes". At the time, our leaders thought it was fine. But now no one seems to have a good word to say about poor, put-upon Fred Goodwin.

According to a new book, the former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland was quite fussy about the little things. He didn't, for example, like the wrong kind of biscuit, and threatened disciplinary action when it turned up. He didn't like regulations that said you couldn't smoke, and got an engineer to switch smoke alarms off. He wasn't, unfortunately, quite so fussy about the big things, which may be why the British taxpayer had to spend £37bn bailing his bank out.

Like another former friend of our government, Goodwin doesn't seem to have been all that nice. But he got not just big money, but a knighthood. This, perhaps, is what we call a "role model".

First: as I see it, succes without honour or conscience does not a role model make.

Comments?

Secondly: Why, oh why do we keep posting money in the banks?? They are private businesses, but has suddenly become the world's biggets welll-fare clients, along with various other buisnesses!

It is neither here nor there. Either buy the bank's shares and get control, or let them fall. The capitalistic system clearly states that it is sound because what does not work will be weeded out. What happened to that idea?

I myself is all for controlling them, since they has shown to everyone that they are not competent to run their own businesses, and that this throws the world into econimical crises. I also believe in strong control of currency trades, as that can have the same effect. Why should we let the greed and stupidity of a few ruin everything for so many people?

Isn't it really weird, when you think of it, that such a thing as money, which is after only a consensual abstract idea that you can exchange them for real stuff, can harm the world so much?

The reference to role models reminded me of another item in the same paper: Schmidt, CEO of Google, telling off the UK for neglecting science education and support for inventors. The rot started, like so many other things, with the Thatcher government, who believed we could all get rich by copying the US model of "unfettered" capitalist entrepreneurship - and even then, people who weren't dazzled by the colour of money could see where that model was headed.

(My own son has come up against the problems with technical education. He wanted to take a minor in electronics alongside his major in science, which would have exactly suited his career plans, but his college don't do that any more. They're focussed on courses you take in order to go to University and do more studying: if you want to study something with real practical application, you have to go to the other place down the road, which was called the "Technical" until the Department of Education decided to pretend we're all academics. We're still being divided into the white-collar chaps who are supposed to run things but don't know how to do anything useful, and the blue collars who can make and mend stuff but are kept down on the shop floor where they belong.)

Though the omens aren't good, I'm still hoping that we come out of this crisis with a general acceptance that "unfettered" capitalism, like communism, is an idea which was really seriously tried and didn't work, so it's time to try something else. Though interestingly, the Chinese success seems to be built on combining those two supposedly incompatible systems and somehow keeping the mix from curdling. The most successful economies in Europe are those that kept a balance between socialism and capitalism, so I guess China had to add the most extreme entrepreneurial model to their system to achieve the same balance.

Not an argument, just a few reflections.

I will not argue with what your saying leo9, but i would like to point out that China is teetering on the edge of colapsing itself. It only needs a light wind to blow in the right direction and it will be with the rest of us. The point being that there might not be any sound method for financial stability. The other thing i ask is, does it really matter what a school name is called as long as it gives the education that is required?

Be well IAN 2411