How do we encourage decent behaviour?

I’ve worked in countries that were communist, those that still have dictatorships and generally prefer western democracy.  Our cops are better.  Otherwise I’m not sure what the economic system claims to be matters much.  One of my favourite fictional detectives is Harry Bosch (Michael Connelly) and his working motto is ‘either everyone counts, or nobody does’ – this means that the little old lady who is a victim matters as much as the President.  What matters to me in a political-economic system is the extent we can work for each other in this manner.  I’ve seen it done everywhere from the coldest moral climate in Eastern Europe to Islamic dictatorships.  Sadly, it’s in decline in my own country as cops leave people to drown in shallow ponds, and all kinds of other ‘professionals’ go jobsworth over Baby P and more.

What we need is a system that encourages and supports this.  I suspect, if we could list 100 features of democracy-capitalism and rule out about 5 of them, we’d be close.  Harry Bosch would be on the trail of banksters and missing trillions, given the chance, whilst still sorting out the disabled family having gang trouble!  Gadget-Knacker-Serpico-Maigret are sadly too often doing neither.  This is not because the cops themselves are the kind of people who wouldn’t – so what is the problem?  The easy answer is the system, but that’s like the simple question ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ – you have to write the theory of economics to answer it.

Why Do Our Kids Leave School So Helpless?

When I was at school kids of my grandson’s age would be leaving about this time next year and going into work of some kind.  He has at least two years to go.  I know the economy has changed under the charge of international banksterism, but when I was young kids like my grandson went into real work.  Now, with far more of them equipped with academic qualifications, vast numbers are unemployed or on schemes of some sort we know are mostly rot.

My lad has some disability and though he isn’t thick, struggles with work around the house – from hoovering to wiring a plug.  We’re getting him a new computer table tomorrow and he will struggle to put the flat-pack together – indeed he will try and avoid the task completely.  He is, in fact, work-shy, though the disability is connected with this.  All this makes him like his mates rather than unlike  them.

If dealing with unemployment was genuinely about giving people the right training we would surely have identified the skills and be producing people with them.  The identification of training needs and training evaluation is one of my skills.  I’d say we have made a complete mess of it.  The essential mistake is assuming that most people can learn work skills other than through doing the work.  Indeed, I believe education barely works at all except as child-minding and this has expanded into the universities.

The answer is to stop all the scheme nonsense and pretending education can or should produce the skills employers want.  We need instead to guarantee and provide jobs.  We are failed in this entirely by the employers and our economic thinking.  We need to fit the jobs to the unemployed not try the silk purses from sows’ ears approach.  And we need to admit all we’ve been doing is importing better workers from abroad.

I’d go for an international service programme for all our kids from 14 – 21 and all unemployed across the EU (as far across the developed world as possible).  This would include time-release to colleges and all concerned would be affiliated to a university from 16 whether they attended as students or not.  I’d like to see this programme be a safety beyond which no one could fall without making that a choice, and welfare would not be a standard alternative.

Our economies can’t recover without doing something about flat-lined and decreasing wages – we have made the bottom half of our societies so illiquid we have begun to destroy our markets in the real economy.  We need to make our employers compete for the workers they want – they always claim to be smart, innovative and the rest afterall.  Currently, the discrimination against our dafter and less skilled is worse than anything we managed on race and colour.

 

What Happened To Putting Problem Families Right?

This woman was partly in charge of efforts to do stuff like getting welfare scroungers back to work.  Good choice Cameron – her company now stands charge of forcing people to work for her for nothing and counts of fraud.

She’s gone, sadly not to the Tower of London for a short stay before beheading.  The genius response has been to replace her with Blair crony Louise Casey  - a long-term failure in anything from victim support to whatever else her hand has been turned to.  Tell us we haven’t just continued business-as-usual.

It’s time to insist none of this crap works, other than for those who run companies that profiteer from the unfortunate or take hefty salaries to produce statistics governments can use to pretend they are doing something.

Not long ago the turkeys we didn’t vote in were promising Nulabour-style numoney focused on the scrote to rehabilitate them.  Instead we just have less of the old devious inaction and the same shits ripping of tax-payer money at both ends – welfare must be expanding  - surely no one believes the employment numbers – and there is no change in the people running scams (did I mean schemes – nah!) or amassing the civil service pensions.  What a pity Eric Joyce didn’t take Parliament down with him instead of just brawling with a few Tory fopps.

Casey might be viewed as not much more than an unreformed yob herself, though I doubt she could be that useful.  We need radical solutions and people who might actually know what evidence is, rather tan bleating about demands of evidence-based solutions.  Nothing has worked in this area for at least 20 years, whether in stopping anti-social scrote or finding people jobs.  This hasn’t stopped a whole bunch of bastards from taking money for pretending to.

The Land of Milk and Honey

I’m off to the land of milk and honey in a couple of months.  That’s the US of A – the place where those participating in a recent Gallup poll showed the highest level of confidence in an economic recovery in a year.  This is in a country with nearly 13 million unemployed, 46 million people on food stamps and with roughly 29% of the country’s homeowners whose mortgages are under water. They might find it hard to subscribe to the poll’s sunny conclusion.

On the other hand, there’s no getting away from a bevy of seemingly increasingly favourable economic data, which, more recently, includes falling weekly jobless claims, four consecutive monthly gains in the leading economic indicators, somewhat perkier retail sales and a pickup in housing starts and business permits. President Obama has to be elated at this widely perceived peppier economy.  His approval ratings are on the rise.

I’ve long since given up on any of this shit.  Sure the Dow Jones has hit 13,000, the footsie may be at whatever – but is there a factory job done the road?  Is there fuck!  I now believe this economic muck is as real as police crime figures.  There are some factory jobs in Bulgaria, where the Chinese are finding it cheaper to build cars than at home (really – there are – you likely to be getting your Tebbit-cycle out?).

The numbers now make no sense at all.  It looks like share prices are higher – but the money chasing them has been inflated to god knows what in the bank bailouts – and these continue with European banks now able to seize gold deposits from the people.  Greece is no longer a nation.

I’ve just ploughed through several EU reports on Greece.  I could barely read the muck, full of vile language that pretends Greece will bounce back after its flogging.  It reads like the kind of drivel on ‘transition economics’ that the World Bank peddled in Eastern Europe after wallfall.  One particular bit of that started with the promise  transition would take only 500 days, later reduced to 100.  The Wall fell in 1989 and transition might just about be at an end of its beginning and coinciding with the collapse of the myth of the land of milk and honey (democratic capitalism).  That’s that democratic capitalism – the stuff loons with Japanese names that sound like fuck you over told us had triumphed so securely history itself was at an end!

What we are in the middle of here is a mad playing out of the Emperor’s New Clothes in a peculiar state in which there are no children around to point out we are all pissing about freezing our bollocks off in naked frenzy.  Even the dullest can sat that economics is a crock of shit.  The trouble is, it is and anyone who says this can be treated as in idiot.  It now seems the ‘faster than light neutrinos’ are down to faulty wiring at CERN (or travelling even faster due to a GPS error).  The problem with economics is that it’s all based on a system with faulty wiring and didn’t bother to train any electricians.

It’s often said we vote  on the economy.  This is clearly a crock given most voters aren’t even numerate.  We might be voting for bread and circuses.  I’m giving up my right to vote – it hasn’t worked in 40 years and the only protest now is to make it as plain as I can it is worth less than nothing.  Our lives are not any freer than those of most in the dictatorships I’ve worked in.  I visit a US institution soon that has an  alumni fund I know is responsible for evicting African farmers from land bought through a London hedge-come-vulture fund.  Some of these people died.  Thoughts of my Scottish ancestors who were victims of the Enclosures lay heavily with me taking lecture fees on this one.  At least when I taught in the old Soviet Block I was a subversive!  In Bahrain I was expected not to mention the funding of its royals (people already knew – the phrase was ‘being eaten from the inside’).  What am I not expected to say in the USA?  In the UK one is expected to teach economics with no mention of banking theft or that the country is one big offshore tax haven.  The difference lies only in likelihood of arrest.  Everywhere one loses the next gig and is left to make a niche living on the Samizdat trail.

The truth to tell is hideous, but this is not the problem in-itself.  One is in the position of telling a bunch of religious zealots their god doesn’t exist.  The truth is everything we have done in economics was a cover for much more basic human activity.  Sure, we can point out, like Steve Keen, that the dominant model neglected debt – but even this necessary task neglects the pathetic and vile nature of human condition under high-level theory.  Karl Popper got somewhere with this in recognising the theory becomes an excuse for everything.  Disagree with the Marxists and you are in false-consciousness; with the Freudians and you’re in denial; with religionists deny god and you can’t have any morality; as a Nazi one must steel oneself and do utterly vile things to the weak, disabled and non-believers in order to be a good Nazi; as a Wahabi terrorist you end up killing Muslims because they aren’t pure as you are and thus not Muslim.  In the West, what we haven’t done is recognise what our vile ideology actually is.  The question is what has happened on our watch, good and bad, and must in any sane view, have been caused (admittedly this is complex causation) in our name.  Instead we have excuses as vapid as that of an Italian captain accidentally falling into a life boat long before the passengers he was responsible for had been made as safe as possible.  One is not telling truth to power.  One is telling people they have been conned and that they have conflated their identity and individuality with the soaking up of a lying world-view, that what they thought were their normal lives are lies.  Some are not so dumb as not to know this; yet even most of those who know, know too they claimed to themselves they were hopeless to do anything about it.  One has to keep the wolf from the door afterall and all the rest a mortgage slave will say to keep the idea of responsibility away.  The CEO, safe with his years of mega-bonuses taken for all the ‘hard work’, ‘genius’ and ‘being in control’, now knows fuck all about what his company was doing, now the Enron-fraud is outed.  My grandson will play with his i-Phone toy  (it’s a real one, but less face it they are toys) with no ‘responsibility’ for Apple’s vile manufacturing practices.  I don’t wish the guilt on the lad – but the issue is that we have brought massive and unnecessary suffering because we can displace responsibility to “theory” – as surely as any suicide bomber.

These words, sadly, contain the seeds of yet another high-level theory, another grand-narrative we need to remain incredulous towards.  Human beings in history have preferred to kill each other and die in droves rather than suffer this Kantian sublimation! I will no doubt take my American fees.  The only plan I have is to be retired abroad when the trouble really starts.

Fairness?

Some of our bwanksters have been subject to not getting bonuses based on selling fraudulent loan protection.  The BBC broadcast that this was new.  In fact ‘claw-back’ is a common feature and dread for salespeople in financial services and especially insurance.

Zerohedge - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/its-official-greece-unveils-negative-salary - shows just how tough things can get for ordinary, non-bwankster folk.  Teachers face not just cuts but working for nothing or negative salary for a while in Greece, then at much reduced rates.

The real economic truth is that a bunch of rich, idle, peculiarly libidinal bastards have had it away with our hard-earned and politicians have aided and abetted them whilst collapsing our vital work economies.  I have often alluded to sending manufacturing to China as ‘selling whiskey and guns to the Indians’ – in fact we sold them the manufacturing facilities and distilleries.  The analogy is purely to film – the conquest involved was vile and genocidal via scorched earth (buffalo eradication) and disease.  ’We’ were the bastards.

Marx called for worker of the world to unite – in fact the world’s rich have.  Double standards are everywhere.  We are still debating whether bwanksters are worth their pay and bonuses whilst ordinary workers’ conditions are summarily reduced to “negative pay”.  More than 50% of US citizens receive some form of welfare and we still harp on about the triumph of western capitalism.  Millibore the Ineffectual can pass himself off as a Labour leader in this amoral climate.  We claim to be democratic as, at every turn, we weaken worker pay, conditions and rights in order to be able to bully them down to the status of Chinese worker-serfs!  Human resource management, once about making conditions in your firm so good no one would be arsed with union crap, is no a vile set of evil rhetoric.

We need a New Deal (and not some Nulabour piss) across the globe.  The key is in the idiot propaganda film ’300′ when the hero uses the great line ‘You are fighting free men, not slaves’.  Shite as the film was as a distortion of history (the Persians were probably a lot less brutal than the Greeks and the film should have shown arse-banditry amongst the Spartans) – this line is the point, if suitably de-sexisted.

We currently talk of hard work and self-reliance when the job market has collapsed – largely because technology and organising systems have improved productivity – and more are due.  All the politicians available to vote for prattle on about “growth” and fiddle with what is a simple neo-classical (i.e. failed) economic spreadsheet.  What we need is structural change.  This has to start in completely new thinking on work and reward.

Banking should not attract salaries higher than anywhere else.  All the excuses given are rot and based on two wrongs making a right.  If Rooney is worth his money, so is Fred the Shred.  Bolloxs!  All sports could be run with a salary cap and this could be based on what we think the job is worth.  In the old Rugby League dressing rooms we all got the same match fee.  Tell me the 1978 cup final wasn’t as good as last years.  Look what just happened to Spurs on a wet and bobbly Stevenage dung-heap last week.  Tell me who was worth more than the game lad playing right back for the minnows.

In real consideration on pay we should consider what letting people get rich really does. The most obvious is that they get control of all sorts of stuff they have no right to and they always seek to maintain their advantage, giving their kids unfair advantages through education and networking.

Whatever the secret of success is, I’ve never seen any non-dross explication of it in more than 20 years as an academic.  As a manager it was very noticeable how many other managers were some fucker’s brother-in-law.  In studies I’ve read, researchers were unable to find anyone ‘unconnected’ in the fancy business school I was once a visiting lecturer at.

Even when we talk of rewarding success, we don’t really get anywhere, because ‘success’ can be produced by false accounting.  Why are the bwanksters not repaying all the money they lost (in fraud) by lifetime indenture on negative salary – that is, what we are doing to Greek teachers?

Only an unwise man would have tried to part me from my winning pay – but one can see direct links there.  In detailed analysis, one can make direct links between CEO pay and the collapse in worker wages.  Why do we let these creeps choose their own targets – how are we suckered into letting the consideration of performance stop at bottom lines so easy to fiddle to the purpose of one small set of interests?  These are not good people – just a bunch of scheming fucks no better than animals.  It’s common in animal herds for a “king” to live in luxury whilst keeping others downtrodden.

Arguments from the bottom line might hold if bottom lines weren’t so easy to fiddle and if the myth of competitive innovation, working smarter and others were true.  Britain and the UK would now have vast numbers of ‘smart workers’ in ‘smart jobs’ – the truth is the opposite with much skill now embodied in machines – amazingly not much of the banking and education that could be.  It makes sense in this nonsense to strip workers of pay, decent conditions and pensions AND pay CEOs massive amounts.  In 1980, the bottom half has 14% of liquid assets – this is down to 1% – and this process hardly produces a wealthy population to spend money on growth.

We should raise living standards across the globe by identifying the work needed, being prepared to police it to prevent local thugs and money-lenders getting in the way.  Global government should be presenting ideas on what the responsibilities of citizens in such a society are.  Population control, aims towards sustainable energy and renewal, agriculture – and what politicians and leaders should do.  To get to any of this I think we need to start thinking of “leadership” as the main block to progress.  Just look at some of the absolute bastards history has thrown up.  Hitler (a rather nice chap to those around him), Stalin, any number of Romans, religious weirdos and utterly peculiar arses like Churchill, Blair, Bush and DSK!  Even Gandhi ended up in bed with kids laying claim to be saving the world through his abstinence.  The GOP can’t even put forward a non-loony and Obama is clearly bought and paid for despite his Internet campaign funding stuff.

Anyone who has tried herding cats in unstructured groups, or to get recruits still raw from basic training to one side of a street to another under fire (etc.) knows people don’t generally cooperate well without direction, training, drills and the rest.  None of this means we should give up to “great leaders” and their arrays of bullshit and bullying.

How pathetic is it that we can standardise the rules and playing conditions of sports across the globe and yet not have a quality of work-life set of rules for international economic competition and cooperation?  We had the idea long ago – just no practice.  All our managers and politicians have shown over the years is they have no moral fibre and cheat on what should be rights for all at the drop of the ‘it’s a global competition out there’ hat.  In fact it is in no way a global competition in the way FIFA soccer is with level playing fields and strict refereeing.  This was managed, admittedly imperfectly, even though Blatter an his cronies run it!

We probably know enough about bureaucracy now to avoid the pitfalls of gonadotrophic thinking like dictatorships of the proletariat and politburo.  A decent world isn’t with us because we have been conned into thinking we can’t organise one.  I’m no leftie and believe in an international service solution linked with enterprise.  I do believe the rich have done so much damage they should spend the rest of their unworthy lives in negative income atonement.

UK Financial Sector Debt and Assets May Be A Good Thing

National Statistics (ONS) say our external liabilities were £6.7 trillion in Q2 – 461% of our annualized GDP.  The UK is presented in a number of horror headlines as ‘the world’s biggest debtor.  Given most of us see debt as owing someone else and as a bad thing, all the financial services debt tends to be seen as a very bad thing.  This neglects that there are two columns to consider – debt and assets.  UK overseas assets are also big. They‘re £6.4 trillion. So our net overseas liabilities are just £309.4bn, 21.2% of annualized GDP. This itself largely a reflection of the fact that we’ve been running  small current account deficits for ever and a day.
Our huge gross assets and liabilities, to a large extent, reflect the UK’s position as a financial centre and much of the debt-asset combination is actually held by foreign banks operating in the UK.

If a UK bank  swaps a loan with a French one, UK assets and liabilities vis-à-vis France both rise by the same amount. The UK does more of this sort of thing than other countries, so our overseas assets and liabilities are disproportionately big relative to other countries.  We may have some severe problems if we’ve been doing dodgy swaps with Greeks, but if due diligence has been observed this won’t be the case.

In Q2 we actually had a small surplus (£3.4bn) on net investment income, as our assets yielded more than our liabilities.  This excludes capital gains or losses, but is what you’d expect from prudent investment.  After all, a business borrows money and incurs debt in order to make a profit – the idea is to make profit faster than you spend on costs.

Our big overseas assets and liabilities are just what we need if we haven’t just been buying pigs in pokes.  As sterling falls it’s a good idea to have foreign assets, though I guess our foreign currency assets are largely matched by foreign currency borrowing.

There are many questions on whether our financial wizards are keeping honest books and any of the assets are worth more than a ton of Max Keiser‘s goat poo, but in principle this aspect of UK debt does not turn us into the world’s largest debtor and could actually be healthy unless the assets it bought turn out to be high yield, delta-hedged Greek honesty bonds or securitisation of sub-prime mortgages in Gary Indiana. The question is whether the money was borrowed and pissed up the wall (in bankster bonuses), or used to buy investments that will pay an income or appreciate.  You’d think some overpaid BBC BimboJourno would be able to tell us.

The UK has been buying a lot of US paper of late (along with the other major international debtor Japan).  It may be that all this debt is part of a giant Ponzi scheme and that all will go tits up if some parties stop doing the trades (China and Russia are pulling the plug on US paper).  I can’t tell and the standard analysis, still absent from BBC Bimbo levels of reporting, is as above.  Nothing to worry about if the money has been used to buy real stuff or in honest trades.  After all, if you owe a few million, invested in houses and the rents pay the mortgages and give you a net income, life is sweet.  If you pissed it away on tonsil lubricant down the local or bet on a donkey in The Derby, it ain’t.  The latter would be the case if this UK financial sector overseas debt is floating on Greek credit derivative swaps.  Some hedge fund may well be betting this is the case.  If banks weren’t allowed so much secrecy I could tell you.  If I was a BBC journalist, I’d be making enquiries – but then who’d want to be that git Robert Peston?  I’d place a bet on him being next in line for Royal toadying.  Given our useless media, we’ll have to wait for the umpteenth Greek bailout to fail to know just what UK and foreign banks here have been buying.  I already have a bet on that failure!

In the meantime, we need to remember that debt is an investment and working out what to invest in instead of the doomed austerity project.  Crap like Facebook and business models based on advertising revenue won’t do and nor will financial services that need bubbles and asset inflation.  I’d go for an investment in our young and unemployed people giving them all three years international service administered by our universities and hopefully partnered across the EU and USA.  I’d put this on a war footing without a war.  And I’d make the rich pay by investing in the project.  The real problem with debt is we’ve been investing in the wrong things.  Money shouldn’t be allowed to make money and income should either be earned through work or invested in developing people rather than riches for a few.  Debt should be a matter of honour and gratitude for that investment, not debt peonage to the rich.  And what would be better than the entrepreneurial, creative private sector doing this public good instead of flooding us with plastic crap from China and horning in on those parts of the public sector already run better by the State?

Radical Change?

I tend to believe fantastic stories like this one concerning the birth of photosynthesis in plants through the capture of a bacterium 1.6 million years ago - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120221125409.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+UK

I know some biology and tend to trust the hard science disciplines.  Much has been argued on scientific methods and I don’t believe most of this hits the point.  Science is essentially a rebellion against guff.  This is perhaps why less than 5% of scientists vote Republican.  Some scientists hold religious views but none hold with gawping crap like creationism.  Science isn’t democratic in that expert accounts are privileged over majority opinion.

I once hoped we could make society more scientific, but most people are more or less hopeless at science and avoid its reasoning and methods.  Philosophers from Leibniz to Habermas have dreamed of some kind of language free of ideology in which we could sort out social problems as surely as an accountant doing sums.  The problem with this is it assumes a time in which most people become capable in the language and its reasoning skills, against the evidence that 100 years of universal education has failed where we have experimented with it.

Science itself is now telling us decisions are not made rationally and that conscious rationalisation takes place after a much faster sub-conscious process.  We have long suspected the mind works as a network and that evidence impinges on a world-view most people conflate with individuality and identity.  In fact, most such world-views are just soaked-up COWDUNG (conventional wisdom of dominant groups).

We are not democratic in our democracies – we don’t trust people to act without leadership regulation in most of their daily detail.  We police crime, at least some small portion of it.  We establish chains of command.  we vote and hardly anything and when we do it’s either on trivia or for established political parties that don’t represent us.  How would any of us get to vote for more equality?  In Britain the vast majority of people who joined the Labour Party to vote for Blair as leader cannot have believed he would take us into the Iraq War.  And who the hell is Dominic Strauss Kahn?

I suspect out systems enforce choice we don’t want and are open to abuse by foreign and business interests.  There is something deeply wrong with the way we vote and choose, based in a fiction of self-belief that we are capable of making sense of who is telling us the truth (science shows nearly all of us are poor at this).  We should bring more randomness to our selection processes and not vote for individuals, but for a lot based on a qualified list.  We are simply not smart enough for anything else.

A qualified list would make it more difficult for outside interests to get their moles into positions in our main parties.  It would also render the party machines irrelevant in selection.  And it would disrupt choice on personality and other vapid practices of the ‘Party animals’.  Service would be limited to one or two terms, with half any parliamentary members allowed to stay on by lot and proportionate to the actual vote.

Parliament would be essentially electronic and government open to public scrutiny.  The public would make law and the parliament operate only in administration.  Parliamentarians would be expected to slip back into normal lives after service and barred from positions gained through lobby interests.

Science cannot say our current system is tried and tested.  History rather suggests it has had us nearly always at war, and has done little to share massive increases in productivity and soon will mean Banana Republic wages for most.