Secondly, it really is time he gave up on growth anyway, for two reasons. One is that most people know that the benefits of growth only go to the wealthy.
It’s also insane but it is interesting.
The average British bod doesn’t have a higher standard of living than in 1700? All the growth since then – when per capita growth really took off – has only gone to the rich?
Or 1850, when Spud’s career path as a bean counter would have given him Bob Cratchit’s living standard?
The average bod now has a standard of living, state of health, life expectancy and grub that Royals of the past would be jealous of. The man is mad isn’t he?
“ 1850, when Spud’s career path as a bean counter would have given him Bob Cratchit’s living standard”
He’d be lucky to get (never mind keep) a position as good as Cratchit’s.
So the proportion of the human population living in absolute poverty isn’t the lowest in history, and UN figures are wrong? And if they’re not wrong, this has nothing to do with growth?
The tub of lard couldreally do with reading Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, couldn’t he?
“The man is mad isn’t he?”
No, he’s a grifter, and he needs to keep making more and more out there statements to indulge his audiences biases. If he actually toned things down to something vaguely factual then the nutters would go elsewhere to have their ideological egos massaged.
He’d be lucky to get (never mind keep) a position as good as Cratchit’s.
He’d make himself Professor of Practice in Bob Cratchit studies at Hull University.
Or 1850, when Spud’s career path as a bean counter would have given him Bob Cratchit’s living standard?
But that’s not the path he would have taken. He would have discovered the joys of pedagogy earlier in life and followed the path of Wackford Squeers.
An interesting sight in Palmerston Road, Portsmouth, a couple of weeks ago. Some mad bloke dressed in rags and lying on a strip of filthy cardboard in a shop doorway. He was surrounded by rotting food detritus, and a stream of piss was snaking from his bedding into the gutter. Like so many of these guys, he was shouting angrily about something. As I drew level with him, I realised he was angry at the film he was watching on the home entertainment system, camera, computer, encyclopedia, telephone, and messaging service he was holding.
Simon N: « I realised he was angry at the film he was watching on the home entertainment system, camera, computer, encyclopedia, telephone, and messaging service he was holding. »
You’re sure it wasn’t the Schleswig-Holstein Question?
The narrative that everything in the world just benefits a small group of individuals which you are not a member of worries me. It worries me because so many people believe it to be true, despite the wealth of historical evidence to the contrary.
My parents didn’t have electricity in the home when they were small children and I’m old enough to remember when cars were rare, central heating was a new luxury, and women spent all day Monday doing the washing.
Andy. I remember my grandfather telling me that he was an adult returned from WW1 before he lived in his first home with electricity and indoor plumbing. It really wasn’t that long ago.
When I was young my cousins lived in a back to back in Bradford with an outside toilet. I dint know when they got an indoor toilet but that will have been 60 years ago.
Come to think of it they didn’t have mains sockets wiring but they did have electric lights so they used to plug appliances in to those, not that they had many appliances.
@ andyf
I was born into a middle-class family just after WW2 and we didn’t have central heating nor (for many years) a car (my father used a second-hand bike to travel to work and used the “Senior Staff Cycle Rack” at ICI Billingham) nor (until after I left home to work down south) a TV or a refrigerator. Wearing hand-me-downs was viewed as a patriotic duty rather than an expression of poverty.
If you mentioned a “Senior Staff Cycle Rack” to Gen Z they’d think it came from a Monty Python sketch but it existed and several guys used it.
Is indeed starting to sound a bit like a Python sketch on this thread. But the point remains sound.
I’m with Andyf on this one, that.this delusion is held by so many is scary, and it’s not just 20-somethings,, plenty my own cohort (well into my 6th decade) buy into the narrative. The mental contortions required to do so are beyond my capability. All of us have parents who started life in much more limited circumstances and as for grandparents…
And that just three generations.
OTOH thanks to perhaps this exact delusion and the political decisions supported in context of it GenZ might experience a setback compared to their parents. Compared to their great grandparents of course, still a featherbed.
“ If you mentioned a “Senior Staff Cycle Rack” to Gen Z they’d think it came from a Monty Python sketch but it existed and several guys used it.”
That sounds quite believable for some of our woke organisations, although I’m cynical enough to think they’d drive to about 3 miles away and then cycle the rest.
In the late 1940s my mother lived in a farmworkers cottage in Shropshire which had neither electricity nor running water. But she were happy….
Actually, she does insist that they were all very happy and didn’t feel the lack of mod cons. Of course she was six or seven. She said she never wanted for anything, my grandparents might have felt differently.
john77 said:
“my father used a second-hand bike to travel to work and used the “Senior Staff Cycle Rack” at ICI Billingham … If you mentioned a “Senior Staff Cycle Rack” to Gen Z they’d think it came from a Monty Python sketch but it existed and several guys used it.”
I have recently seen a bicycle rack marked “Fellows’ bicycles only”, but that was at a Cambridge college.
“I’m with Andyf on this one, that.this delusion is held by so many is scary, and it’s not just 20-somethings,, plenty my own cohort (well into my 6th decade) buy into the narrative. The mental contortions required to do so are beyond my capability. All of us have parents who started life in much more limited circumstances and as for grandparents…”
The trouble is that to your average 20-something the 1960s and 70s are as distant past to them as the War or the Great Depression were to many of the people on here (assuming their ages are in the 50-70 sort of range). If you were born in 2000, you probably grew up with parents who bought a house in the 1990s, which with hindsight were a pretty decent decade to be getting on with life. Unemployment wasn’t too bad, a single man could afford to buy a house on one salary (my mate who had a bog standard job in the council rates dept moved out of his parents straight into his own house in the mid 90s). So the 20 somethings look at what their parents had – own house in their 20 or 30s, cars that were no worse than today, all the usual electronic gubbins, holidays abroad, eating out etc etc. Life in the 90s was not really that much different to today, in basic quality of life. Yes we have more whizzy tech, but thats about it. There’s been no step change in the way one went from houses with outside toilets and a coal fire to plumbing and central heating for example, or from all being on bicycles to affording cars. And the 1990s 20-somethings could afford accommodation. Todays can’t. So is it any wonder the current batch look at ‘capitalism’ and say ‘Its not working!’
Jim, the big step-change since the 90s? Everyone has gone from living in real time in their own location, being aware of other locations by reading, watching the telly or travelling to them, to curating their own digital alter-egos, whilst vicariously experiencing the world non-linearly through other people doing exactly the same thing. There has been a massive retreat from analogue reality into a digitally-polished never-never land where everything can be tweaked, and is safe
This has massive mental consequences that have no previous counterpart. Munchhausen’s by Proxy rules.
“the big step-change since the 90s? Everyone has gone from living in real time in their own location, being aware of other locations by reading, watching the telly or travelling to them, to curating their own digital alter-egos, whilst vicariously experiencing the world non-linearly through other people doing exactly the same thing. There has been a massive retreat from analogue reality into a digitally-polished never-never land where everything can be tweaked, and is safe”
Well quite. But does that appear to be an improvement to the average 20 something? Or more importantly does it make the average 20 something happier? I think the obvious answer to that is no, living in an always ‘on’ virtual world is not a recipe for contentment, or for a centred and balanced psychological development.
I think when we went from having to go to the loo in a shed at the bottom of the garden to an inside flush lavatory those who looked back at how things were would have said ‘Thankfully I don’t have to do that like my parents did’. And would be pleased as a result, their lives seemed better. The instant 24/7 communications world is not making young people happier, its making them more depressed, anxious and unhappy. Yes there are advantages to it, but mainly they accrue to us oldies who grew up in the analogue meatworld and are thus able to better ignore the bad bits of the new tech and use the good bits. Those who have grown up with it from the cradle are not able to do that. They have been formed by it, and its omnipresent for them, with all the accompanying downsides.
So where exactly is the improvement in life experience over the last 30 years, as viewed by the average 20-something? Nowhere would be my point, things have gotten objectively worse for them, in so many ways.
The step change that has happened is productivity. It was rising linearly till 2007 then it went flat. Now at best is rising at a very much slower rate. Rising productivity brings increase in living standards. The perception of steady improvement is arguably more important that the absolute level. With steadily rising productivity people can look ahead and get the sense of improvement ahead. With flat productivity there is no sense that improvement is on the way, so they feel that those improvements that have always been there must be going to someone else.
“The step change that has happened is productivity. It was rising linearly till 2007 then it went flat. Now at best is rising at a very much slower rate. ”
I would suggest 3 reasons for that:
1) Mass immigration started around 2004 with the expansion of the EU eastwards, and the mass movement of their populations to the West. Resulting in lower wages at the bottom at least, and the ability of businesses to throw cheap labour at a problem rather than technology that would have raised productivity. Have 10 Poles doing something manually rather than a machine and one person supervising it. Or the availability of cheap labour allowed businesses to exist that otherwise would not – the ‘hand car wash’ phenomenon.
2) The GFC, and the global response (driving down interest rates by printing money) meant that the economy became zombified on cheap money. Unproductive businesses could continue rather than be bankrupted and replaced with something more productive.
3) The introduction of the smart phone has meant that a good deal of human activity does not show up in data as its now provided free, so there’s no way of measuring it. So we are more productive, but the stats don’t recognise that.
Jim said:
“The instant 24/7 communications world is not making young people happier, its making them more depressed, anxious and unhappy. Yes there are advantages to it, but mainly they accrue to us oldies who grew up in the analogue meatworld and are thus able to better ignore the bad bits of the new tech and use the good bits. Those who have grown up with it from the cradle are not able to do that.”
That’s a very interesting idea.