A Comparative Study of the Expense of Spin

An apolitical reflection, as today is apolitical by statute. The following OECD municipalities are rough equivalents of Barcelona (1.62 million) in terms of population:

Hamburg: 1.8 million
Philadelphia: 1.55 million
Montreal: 1.62 million
Vienna: 1.7 million
Budapest: 1.7 million

Four of the five examples are in distinctly richer countries. Logically, Barcelona's spending on communication--much of it spin, advertising, posters, freesheets: propaganda--should be equivalent to or lower than its analogues.

How much does Barcelona spend on communication? The relevant items from the 2011 budget read as follows,

To items 92502 and 92503 one must add a further expenditure classified as an unclassifiable expense, i.e.

The sum total of 92502, 92503 and 22602 is 31,729,211 euros, equivalent to the starting salary of 1322 nursery school teachers working for the City. 

How does this compare with the OECD city whose population comes closest to matching Barcelona's? Here are the figures for Montreal:

In euros, that's 3,128,812--less than 10% of the figure for Barcelona. Last time I was there, the snow ploughs made their rounds, the sidewalks were clear, the buses running, the bagels delicious (in both languages). Montreal is a mature democratic polity. What is Barcelona?

Conflict of Interest

In an earlier post I noted that a former Vanguardia columnist, Eugeni Madueño, was behind a newly launched publishing venture, Edicions Clariana.  Clariana and by extension Madueño have produced more than one hundred pages of City of Barcelona colour inserts in La Vanguardia since early January. Yesterday's paper brought two such inserts: one published by Clariana, and one--the one-hundred page glossy Vivir en Vanguardia--by La Vanguardia itself. The latter looks like a magazine, yet there's nothing on the spine, and an ISBN rather than an ISSN; of only four pages of add copy, two were placed by the city hall. One of these two pages, the back cover, is simply the City of Barcelona logo magnified to 75% of the width of the page. That is, it nearly looks like an official publication. The editor? Eugeni Madueño. Madueño is both publishing for city hall and working for a paper with a mandate to cover city hall. Mr. Madueño would seem to be subject to a conflict of interest: he can't be expected to report objectively on a level of government which is paying him. Then again, it may be naive of me to expect a clean separation of the fourth estate from government.

Colours

Once upon a time, Barcelona Council advertised its presence thus:

That is, white lettering on turquoise stood for the municipal corportation. By 2006, at least one campaign had abandoned turquoise for red:

Since late 2010, many public building administered by Barcelona council have be rebranded to make the link more conspicuous:

One notices that white lettering on a red background carries the most important message content, and that every plaque carries with it an implicit good vibe (the letter 'B' and the Catalan for 'well' or 'good' are homophones). To what might we owe this new colour scheme? Just a suggestion:

What's Wrong with Catalan Schools? (III)

In the 2009 OECD Pisa Report, my home school system of Ontario scored 531 points for reading skills, with a fairly narrow spread between the lowest and the highest scores. Spain and Catalonia rated lower, as they did in mathematics, despite steady improvement across the 2003, 2006, and 2009 reports. (Scores for reading stood at  481 and 498, respectively.) Ontario schoolchildren spend sixteen more days at school per year than do their Catalan counterparts, which may go some way to explaining the difference in scores. My first question, then, is why there is no public debate in Catalan media about the number of contact hours as an aspect of education policy.

More worrying than overall scores is the shape of bell curve for Spanish reading scores. Consider this:

Click for a larger image.

Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-590-x/2010001/tbl/tblb1.13-eng.htm

Reading scores are here broken down into six ranges. How many students score in the highest of these six ranges? In Ontario, it's 1.9%; in Spain, it's 0.2%. How many score in the two two ranges, Levels 5 and 6 together. In Ontario, it's 14.2%; in Spain, 3.4&. How many score in the top three ranges, Levels 4-6? In Ontario, it's 41.9%, in Spain, 21.2%. Spain catches up with the rest of the developed world with very healthy percentages in Levels 2 and 3--both of are tantamount to a passing mark--but does very poorly if one concentrates on students who are scoring particularly high. Numerically, Spain does a poor job at producing brilliant students. Thus my second question: Why?

Report Card: The Foundation for Science, Health and Education

Too tired to talk politics, I've decided to prolong January's exam marking drudgery by applying to the English versions of Catalan web sites, in the public or the third sector, the same standards applied to English majors at Catalan universities. In all cases, I want to ask if money has been spent well--and in some cases, if I conclude that no money has been spent, money not spent is not money well spent.

Valentí Fuster runs the Zena and Michael A. Wiener Cardiovascular Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan.  He's a highly distinguished man of whose accomplishments a proper account would fill the front matter of heavy book. He is also publicly minded. Early in 2010 he leant his name to a third-sector initiative, the Science, Health and Education Foundation, headquartered in Barcelona, whose mandate it is to raise awareness of cardio-vascular health among school-age children.  The foundation's website--http://www.fundacionshe.org--is available in English, Catalan, and Spanish.

The English text is not always comprehensible: "Make enjoy to your ear while helps the foundation" reads a prominent sidebar on the welcome page. Some translations are not complete, with Spanish text left dangling at the end of the English version. The translator is not a native speaker and in all likelihood does not have a university training in translation, for there is no evident regard for register or pragmatics. The literalism of rendering "Contact con nosotros" as "Contact with us" (a mistake Google Translate does not make) makes one think that the translator lacked university training in modern languages; and there has been  That said, the message content is decipherable to those with a great measure of patience.

Mark: 3/10.

Good News

The Generalitat is to drop €3 million from its budget by scrapping a quarterly glossy, InfoCatalunya, delivered to every Catalan home. Without so much as a hiccough, La Vanguardia describes InfoCatalunya as featuring "propaganda de la obra del Govern". It will not be missed.

Branded

In an earlier post, I noticed that the PSC is hooked, as an addict would be hooked--painfully and destructively--on public sector advertising serving party political ends. The PSC has lost the Generalitat, and looks set to lose control of both Barcelona City Council and the Barcelona provincial Diputació. With every euro of public money the PSC spends on selling its own virtues, the hole it is digging for itself gets a little deeper.

Bundled together with today's Vanguardia, cheek by jowl with a flyer from PC City, is a 36-page magazine published by City Hall. The writers are La Vanguardia staffers; the production credits go to Edicions Clariana, for which the single Google hit is the company's own static web page. (Garnering one and only one hit from Google in 2011 is an achievement worthy of a Twilight Zone remake or a Jason Bourne thriller.) The title, Barcelona: Presupuesto 2011, belies the dirth of hard numbers between the covers. This magazine, or flyer, or pamphlet, was not intended for accountants. In 36 pages, it manages 36 colour photographs (though one page is mysteriously blank, evidence of self-censorship or a rush). There is no pretence of objectivity. Every headline casts the government of the city in a favourable light; every photographs tells an upbeat story. Hyperbole abounds: "Limpieza contante" reads one headline, as though we'd woken up in a city where street cleaners never slept. Two politicians make glossy, well-lighted appearances: Mayor Hereu and Deputy Mayor Jordi Carnes, both PSC men. Mr. Hereu's coalition partners do not.

The joke, of course, is on Mr. Hereu. He's spent money to sell the message that he's not wasting money, but to do so is to waste money and insult the democratic instincts of an electorate which, if it fails to vote, does so out of a mix of disgust and decency. Mr. Hereu had branded himself, in both senses of the word.

To top it all, it's all in Spanish. There's not a word of Catalan.