Long time no hear from you! Good to hear from you again.
Yes, I can understand why Oxford is an exception. Every year it is receiving thousands of new, young highly intelligent (though also impressionable) undergraduates who are well able to organise lots of things with great energy and enthusiasm. I guess there are similar university places in America where this happens.
I like statistics. Tell me how many members the Oxford LETS scheme has. Among those, tell me how many carpenters, plumbers, electricians, car mechanics and others of a similar practical bent it has.
Keith Hudson
At 21:10 09/06/2003 +0100, you wrote:
<loud coughing>
Keith said: "Over here, 100% of LETS (and similar) schemes fail within 18
months. They are constantly springing up and constantly dying."
Perhaps he'd like to think about Oxford Let system which has a few hundred
active members (about a 50% dropout rate but with a consistent core which
turns over much more slowly but isn't static, more of a "natural"
turnover) and has been trading steadily for the last 10 years (we've just
had our anniversary).
Right now I'm employing two people for part spokes - someone to knead out
the knots in my twice-broken back (ouch) and someone to help me with the
base of a shed (I am physically a bit limited, to say the least. See
"back" above :=( "Part" as they need sterling for things like room rent
for treatments at the health centre, petrol for transport and tool hire
etc.
I've a balance of some 600 "spokes" (Oxford is a city with a lot of
cycling for transport happening in it) built up from helping people with
computers and lekky wiring etc. and advice/consultancy in areas like house
rentals.
Perhaps the secret is that we've enough people in the area with practical
skills who can find in turn services they want to trade. Other areas may
not have the same rather insular yet large enough scale as Oxford
(population about 110k, lots of "alternative" type people hanging about,
though a bit unbalanced towards the chakra balancers compared to us
practical types, but not enough to fatally skew the system).
Perhaps it would be instructive to analyse the systems that have proven
themselves to have long-term viability and see what social and cultural
characteristics they have that keep them so.
<cue flow of thought from mind shattered by getting babies to bed>
Oxford was founded at the height of the last recession when a lot of
people started trading around the margins (we've a high proportion of
lumpen intelligentsia here who are rather marginal economically but can be
quite imaginative when faced with a problem compared to "downsized"
working class stuffed when the car factories and associated small cluster
firms closed down). Class analysis of the lumpen intelligentsia is
interesting - collectively we're amongst the more intelligent % of the
university educated but disproportionately from low class origins, and
have therefore disproportionately hit barriers in career terms due in
large part to the operation of the British class system upon people who
graduated out of the universities since the late 60s/early 70s. I dunno
what the outcomes are for graduates from the mid 90s on, I don't tend to
have much contact with them, but collectively from my sojourn as an
academic before being clobbered by an auto-immune illness (as if the
spinal injuries weren't enough..) they are significantly less adventurous
and imaginative or broad ranging in mental terms, and with a much larger
"tail" of those with marginal abilities, significantly less clever
statistically in any measure than us lot were who entered uni in the first
flush of allowing entry to the lower orders. Working class entrants were
universally in the top decile, and usually in the top 5-1% ability range
at university in my day. You had to be to overcome the barriers.
America (I grew up in Canada and USA until my late teens, English mother)
has a powerful self-delusion over its class society. It exists just as
powerfully as in England, and is in fact harder to overcome at the initial
stages. No way could I ever have had university education over there (one
of the reasons we decamped to Britain for my sister and myself, as we were
a single parent family by then) for financial reasons.
If there is a difference in social mobility, it is perhaps AFTER one has
bootstrapped oneself out of the poor social layers - the glass ceiling I
and many like me met on graduation/post graduation perhaps don't form such
a barrier over there. But I suspect that might also be a delusion - from
what I've seen the USA has been a more socially static society since well
before the 40's festivities.
So, in a convoluted way, a class analysis of what could make lets schemes
work in critical-mass sized provincial market towns with a strong
representation of graduate level educated not quite career successful
people...
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
