Alex Singleton has been consorting with the students of Warwick University, where he recently did a speaking engagement.  They couldn’t afford to drink, he says, and they aren’t allowed to smoke.  But it’s worse than that:

Tediously, some of them decided to ask me, over the sound of guitars and drums, about post-Washington Consensus international development theory and how they might get good internships in the City.

He ends his piece thus:

The danger is that by robbing students of the traditional university lifestyles, we will end up creating a workforce of boring people who simply obey and conform. These people might be good at jobs that involve mundanely sitting in cubicles and emailing internal memos. But as we face increasing competition from emerging economies like India and China, it is workers who show creativity and innovative thinking who are most economically crucial.

I doubt this.  The assumption that subsequent creativity can be correlated with how much adolescent mayhem you created strikes me as rather implausible.  Just as likely is that, denied the right to strike out on their own with sex, drugs, rock, roll etc., students will instead get creative with their careers and career plans.  No more likely, though.  But no less.

Actually, I think the best way to stimulate future economic activity is public spending cuts, tax cuts, deregulation, and so on.  Economic signals surely count for more than social habits when you were younger.

Samizdata favours the right to have fun also, and made another bit of this piece its quote of the day for yesterday.  But the Samizdata line on fun, if there is one, is that fun is good simply because it’s fun.