Okay, it’s time for some music.
This one is Underworld’s masterpiece Born Slippy, from the soundtrack of Trainspotting and never released on an album. Rightly, it’s their show-closer. It was a HUGE worldwide hit. Live, they do a nine-plus-minute version. And half the time there’s barely anything there. It’s all in the drums, and if you only heard the drums, you would still know this was Born Slippy. There’s so little to this it makes Philip Glass sound like Mozart (“too many notes, dear Mozart”). The only song I can think of with less is Timbaland’s production of Hollerback Girl for Gwen “Legs” Stefani. So settle back, put the headphones on and let your hair stand on end.
Monday, 17 August 2015
Thursday, 13 August 2015
July 2015 Review
Hot hot hot. Especially the 1st, when I spent the afternoon and evening swimming, at a meeting and then had supper in Rosa’s. Any time I moved, sweat poured off me. But these things have to be done.
I read Curationism: How Curating Took Over The Art World and Everything Else by David Blazer; The True Story of the Fabulous Killjoys; Jose Saramago’s Death at Intervals; The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; Adam Warren’s Empowered Unchained V1; Hot Naked Kittens: Stories by Delicious Tacos; Andy Clark’s Being There.
Sis and I had Supper at Mosob on the Harrow Road, where were complimented on how well we cleared the good stuff off the plates without filing ourselves to bursting on the soft Eritrean bread.
I had meetings with solicitors, the family IFA, my nephew and Sis about wills, investments and powers of attorney. All of which is a little more attention-taking than you might think. And fitted in an emergency visit to the orthodonist.
Spontaneously, I bought a neat Hugo Boss rectangular watch and went to talk to Number Six in trendy Dray Walk, opposite Rough Trade Records, about a square Tsovet I liked. This is called “distraction”. And I probably needed it.
I read Curationism: How Curating Took Over The Art World and Everything Else by David Blazer; The True Story of the Fabulous Killjoys; Jose Saramago’s Death at Intervals; The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; Adam Warren’s Empowered Unchained V1; Hot Naked Kittens: Stories by Delicious Tacos; Andy Clark’s Being There.
Sis and I had Supper at Mosob on the Harrow Road, where were complimented on how well we cleared the good stuff off the plates without filing ourselves to bursting on the soft Eritrean bread.
I had meetings with solicitors, the family IFA, my nephew and Sis about wills, investments and powers of attorney. All of which is a little more attention-taking than you might think. And fitted in an emergency visit to the orthodonist.
Spontaneously, I bought a neat Hugo Boss rectangular watch and went to talk to Number Six in trendy Dray Walk, opposite Rough Trade Records, about a square Tsovet I liked. This is called “distraction”. And I probably needed it.
Monday, 10 August 2015
Movies I Have Seen An Unhealthy Number of Times
(Inspired by Hadley Freeman’s book on 80’s movies, some of which she’s seen way too many times, and most of which were written and directed by John Hughes. None of mine were.)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1974) Loosely based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, Elliott Gould shambles his way through early 1970’s Los Angeles. The photography, by Vilmos Sigmund, is gorgeous, and the script, by Leigh Brackett, has a memorable line or exchange in every scene. I saw this twice in the week it came out at the Odeon in Exeter, and haven’t stoppped watching it since. The critics didn’t like Altman’s Marlowe when the film came out, but as time has passed, this movie has become a legend. It’s flip, cool and has a great payoff at the end.
Dog Town and Z-Boys (Stacey Peralta, 2001) I once contemplated a post called “Everything I Know About Excellence I Learned From This Movie”. I didn’t write the post, but I probably used the thought as an excuse to watch it again. Tony Hawk, or whoever the New Guy is now, can do tricks that the original Z-Boys would never have thought possible, but the point is, these guys were the first to work out how to do an arial spin out of a swimming pool. There were no half-pipes in your local council playground like there are now. And they were better then than almost all the kids at the park or even on the South Bank are now. Above all the story is about how to get good at something, and the importance of looking good while doing it.
The General’s Daughter (Simon West, 1999) From the opening shot you can feel the heat, the humidity and the weirdness. John Travolta is a maverick undercover army policeman who happens to be there when the General’s daughter is found dead. Showing a total lack of judgement, the Army puts him in charge of the investigation. He gets teamed up with Madeline Stowe as a fiesty female detective, with whom he had an previous affair. “Brussels. We’ll always have Brussels,” Travolta reminds her. James Woods as a gay PsyOps colonel, a bondage dungeon, a painting cat and a bunch of great lines, plus an outstanding performance from Travlota. “My father was a drunk, a womaniser and a gambler: I worshipped the man” he tells Woods with all sincerity. Great lines, glowing photography, fantastic sets, and justice triumphing at the very end.
Grand Prix (John Frankenhiemer, 1966) In fifty years, nobody has made a better film, or produced better live-action footage, of motor racing. And that includes all the on-board cameras in Formula One for television. The 1960’s were the last decade of gentleman’s motor racing: the season was about ten races long, with most in Europe, one in America and one in South Africa. The film’s version of the Italian Grand Prix was eerily prescient of the actual 1967 race, when Jim Clark lost a lap and made it all back up to take the lead, and John Surtees in theYamura Honda really did win by overtaking out the last corner before the finish line. Everything else is pretty much fiction. Frankenhiemer followed the actual F1 circus from race to race, and many real racing drivers make cameo appearances. I watch it when I’m feeling down, and it never fails to lift me up.
Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) I came out of seeing this movie when it was released and felt more alive than I had for several years. It was the mid-Ninteties and I was in early recovery, but I saw a lot of other movies then that didn’t have that effect. The film alludes to Basqiuat’s drug-taking, but doesn’t get the sheer scale of his debauchery and chaotic behaviour. You have to read the books for that. Schnabel was making a film about Basquiat’s art and the art scene in New York at the turn of the Eighties, so I’m with him on leaving out Basquiat's excess. My favourite passage starts with Anina Nosei visiting Basquiat’s flat and looking at his drawings, and moves on to him producing his first great works in the basement of her gallery. Apparantly, Basquiat’s estate wouldn’t let them use originals, so Schnabel and his assistants re-created his paintings for the movie. Compare this with the documentary, Downtown 88, and it looks glossier, but has the same feel. Schnabel did a good job.
The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (Ben Nicholson, 2009) I liked Dan Flavin’s stuff before I did my O-levels. I have the catalogue from the Kinetics exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (I think half London went to that one). For some reason I lost track of art in my thirties and then made a concerted effort to catch up again in my Forties. I have been on the Contemporary Art Society coach tours. What changed in the time I was away was the importance of the art market, especially for contemporary art. The major buyers are hedge funds, investment houses and other rich people, plus own-account art traders, and for them, it’s a business. They could lose a few million on their holdings of, say, Gerhard Richter, but then they could lose just as much on their holdings of General Motors or HSBC. And Ben Nicholson does a top job of taking us round the players in the market circa 2008, most of whom are still major players and artists now. There’s lots of art on display, lots of interviews and the odd bit of self-indulgence. Just the sort of thing I like.
Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse S2) (Edward Bennet, 1988) In which by some miracle, a bunch of English actors and film crew channel the exact cynicism of Raymond Chandler to perfection. The cast is ridiculous, from Suzanne Bertish at her most controlled, to a young Liz Hurley, and John Thaw playing Morse at his most depressed, cynical and despairing. “Well, they put me on these things when they smell a corpse. One file... anyone. Two files... Ainly or McKay. I'm the three file man... No, she's dead.” Set in the well-off upper-middle classes and oozing with Morse’s dislike of them, in the end, it’s about a man pulling himself out of his own despondency and solving the case. It’s about privilege and dishonesty and a side rip to London where we can see a flash West End estate agent showing tenants round Chelsea Harbour. (Cutting edge stuff at the time.) “We ought to be able to arrest him for his taste, but we can’t,” comments Morse.
Civilisation: The Skin of Our Teeth (Kenneth Clarke, 1969) He wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this episode now. Clarke was the last of the great Hegelian art critics, for whom “culture” meant Greece, Rome, the Catholic Church, and above all the Renaissance. In this episode he looks at the coastal and island Christian communities of the post-Roman days, and it’s the light and images of those islands and beaches that triggers a whole bunch of childhood memories of English coastal holidays for me. Was Clark right? Did Western civilisation survive because of these isolated monasteries? No. Mostly it survived because the Arabs in Constantinople preserved and developed the literary legacy of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years while the European world seemed to be suffering a minor Ice Age that sapped the life out of it. Love or hate Clarke’s thesis, the imagery of this episode conveys the beauty and spirituality of those remote locations.
Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell,1994) Every scene has a great line. It looks fabulous and everyone is pretty. The prettiest people have the most problematical love lives. Yep, it must be a Richard Curtis movie. It’s basically a contemporary costume drama starring Hugh Grant looking gorgeously foppish and English, which is why the rest of the world loved it, with a sharp portrayal of the love life of an attractive young man about town, which is why I loved it. The critical scene is “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”, in which we see Grant’s previous girlfriends, who are the most shallow, shrill, awful bunch of women ever collected round one table. Without that scene you’re going to spend the whole movie wondering why Grant hasn’t been snapped up by some well-bred Eight. With it, you know what he’s avoiding. And if you haven’t had a morning scene like the ones with Andie McDowell in the country pub or the Ritz - but maybe not in such glam locations or with Andie McDowell - then, my friend you do not know the bitter-sweet tastes of love. The most gorgeous shot in the whole film is looking downstream on the Thames just before we cut to Grant and McDowell in her hotel room. (“I think I can resist you: you’re not that cute”. Yea right.)
I could add a whole bunch more that fall under ‘slightly less obsessive’: The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979), An American In Paris (Vincente Minelli, 1951), The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), A Few Good Men, (Rob Reiner,1992), Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000), Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999), quite a few more I can’t remember right now, and of course the entire post 1980’s contemporary films of Eric Rohmer.
What if anything on earth links all of these films? The leading character is usually an attractive single man, who is an outsider with something to prove to himself if not to others. The main obstacle to achieving his goal is his own temperament - there’s a sequence in Grand Prix with James Garner and Toshiro Mifune about exactly that - and once he learns to overcome his own weakness, he gets the girl (Four Weddings), wins the Championship (Grand Prix), solves the case (Last Seen Wearing, The Long Goodbye), wins the trial (A Few Good Men). That’s one theme.
The other is about deciding to commit oneself. In The General’s Daughter, Travolta has to decide to be a policeman first and an Army man and maverick second; Basquiat has to decided to come out hiding when opportunity - in the form of Annina Nosei - comes visiting, and then throwing yourself headlong into the work; Dogtown (and The Great Escape and The Warriors) is about the unexpected rewards of excellence achieved for its own sake, and the value of having a bunch of Bros dedicated to the same thing.
An American In Paris is almost the opposite of all this: it’s a film is about a bunch of modestly talented middle-aged dreamers who will never really make anything of themselves (except the French stage star, who has, if that’s your idea of artistic success). It’s about and for all the middle-aged men who haven’t quite succumbed to the living death of normal life but can’t really break out into the life they want. It says that if you do that, you’ll have to wait for Leslie Caron to change her mind at the last moment and come rushing back to you. Which is why those are called “fairy-tale endings”.
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1974) Loosely based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, Elliott Gould shambles his way through early 1970’s Los Angeles. The photography, by Vilmos Sigmund, is gorgeous, and the script, by Leigh Brackett, has a memorable line or exchange in every scene. I saw this twice in the week it came out at the Odeon in Exeter, and haven’t stoppped watching it since. The critics didn’t like Altman’s Marlowe when the film came out, but as time has passed, this movie has become a legend. It’s flip, cool and has a great payoff at the end.
Dog Town and Z-Boys (Stacey Peralta, 2001) I once contemplated a post called “Everything I Know About Excellence I Learned From This Movie”. I didn’t write the post, but I probably used the thought as an excuse to watch it again. Tony Hawk, or whoever the New Guy is now, can do tricks that the original Z-Boys would never have thought possible, but the point is, these guys were the first to work out how to do an arial spin out of a swimming pool. There were no half-pipes in your local council playground like there are now. And they were better then than almost all the kids at the park or even on the South Bank are now. Above all the story is about how to get good at something, and the importance of looking good while doing it.
The General’s Daughter (Simon West, 1999) From the opening shot you can feel the heat, the humidity and the weirdness. John Travolta is a maverick undercover army policeman who happens to be there when the General’s daughter is found dead. Showing a total lack of judgement, the Army puts him in charge of the investigation. He gets teamed up with Madeline Stowe as a fiesty female detective, with whom he had an previous affair. “Brussels. We’ll always have Brussels,” Travolta reminds her. James Woods as a gay PsyOps colonel, a bondage dungeon, a painting cat and a bunch of great lines, plus an outstanding performance from Travlota. “My father was a drunk, a womaniser and a gambler: I worshipped the man” he tells Woods with all sincerity. Great lines, glowing photography, fantastic sets, and justice triumphing at the very end.
Grand Prix (John Frankenhiemer, 1966) In fifty years, nobody has made a better film, or produced better live-action footage, of motor racing. And that includes all the on-board cameras in Formula One for television. The 1960’s were the last decade of gentleman’s motor racing: the season was about ten races long, with most in Europe, one in America and one in South Africa. The film’s version of the Italian Grand Prix was eerily prescient of the actual 1967 race, when Jim Clark lost a lap and made it all back up to take the lead, and John Surtees in the
Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) I came out of seeing this movie when it was released and felt more alive than I had for several years. It was the mid-Ninteties and I was in early recovery, but I saw a lot of other movies then that didn’t have that effect. The film alludes to Basqiuat’s drug-taking, but doesn’t get the sheer scale of his debauchery and chaotic behaviour. You have to read the books for that. Schnabel was making a film about Basquiat’s art and the art scene in New York at the turn of the Eighties, so I’m with him on leaving out Basquiat's excess. My favourite passage starts with Anina Nosei visiting Basquiat’s flat and looking at his drawings, and moves on to him producing his first great works in the basement of her gallery. Apparantly, Basquiat’s estate wouldn’t let them use originals, so Schnabel and his assistants re-created his paintings for the movie. Compare this with the documentary, Downtown 88, and it looks glossier, but has the same feel. Schnabel did a good job.
The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (Ben Nicholson, 2009) I liked Dan Flavin’s stuff before I did my O-levels. I have the catalogue from the Kinetics exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (I think half London went to that one). For some reason I lost track of art in my thirties and then made a concerted effort to catch up again in my Forties. I have been on the Contemporary Art Society coach tours. What changed in the time I was away was the importance of the art market, especially for contemporary art. The major buyers are hedge funds, investment houses and other rich people, plus own-account art traders, and for them, it’s a business. They could lose a few million on their holdings of, say, Gerhard Richter, but then they could lose just as much on their holdings of General Motors or HSBC. And Ben Nicholson does a top job of taking us round the players in the market circa 2008, most of whom are still major players and artists now. There’s lots of art on display, lots of interviews and the odd bit of self-indulgence. Just the sort of thing I like.
Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse S2) (Edward Bennet, 1988) In which by some miracle, a bunch of English actors and film crew channel the exact cynicism of Raymond Chandler to perfection. The cast is ridiculous, from Suzanne Bertish at her most controlled, to a young Liz Hurley, and John Thaw playing Morse at his most depressed, cynical and despairing. “Well, they put me on these things when they smell a corpse. One file... anyone. Two files... Ainly or McKay. I'm the three file man... No, she's dead.” Set in the well-off upper-middle classes and oozing with Morse’s dislike of them, in the end, it’s about a man pulling himself out of his own despondency and solving the case. It’s about privilege and dishonesty and a side rip to London where we can see a flash West End estate agent showing tenants round Chelsea Harbour. (Cutting edge stuff at the time.) “We ought to be able to arrest him for his taste, but we can’t,” comments Morse.
Civilisation: The Skin of Our Teeth (Kenneth Clarke, 1969) He wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this episode now. Clarke was the last of the great Hegelian art critics, for whom “culture” meant Greece, Rome, the Catholic Church, and above all the Renaissance. In this episode he looks at the coastal and island Christian communities of the post-Roman days, and it’s the light and images of those islands and beaches that triggers a whole bunch of childhood memories of English coastal holidays for me. Was Clark right? Did Western civilisation survive because of these isolated monasteries? No. Mostly it survived because the Arabs in Constantinople preserved and developed the literary legacy of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years while the European world seemed to be suffering a minor Ice Age that sapped the life out of it. Love or hate Clarke’s thesis, the imagery of this episode conveys the beauty and spirituality of those remote locations.
Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell,1994) Every scene has a great line. It looks fabulous and everyone is pretty. The prettiest people have the most problematical love lives. Yep, it must be a Richard Curtis movie. It’s basically a contemporary costume drama starring Hugh Grant looking gorgeously foppish and English, which is why the rest of the world loved it, with a sharp portrayal of the love life of an attractive young man about town, which is why I loved it. The critical scene is “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”, in which we see Grant’s previous girlfriends, who are the most shallow, shrill, awful bunch of women ever collected round one table. Without that scene you’re going to spend the whole movie wondering why Grant hasn’t been snapped up by some well-bred Eight. With it, you know what he’s avoiding. And if you haven’t had a morning scene like the ones with Andie McDowell in the country pub or the Ritz - but maybe not in such glam locations or with Andie McDowell - then, my friend you do not know the bitter-sweet tastes of love. The most gorgeous shot in the whole film is looking downstream on the Thames just before we cut to Grant and McDowell in her hotel room. (“I think I can resist you: you’re not that cute”. Yea right.)
I could add a whole bunch more that fall under ‘slightly less obsessive’: The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979), An American In Paris (Vincente Minelli, 1951), The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), A Few Good Men, (Rob Reiner,1992), Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000), Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999), quite a few more I can’t remember right now, and of course the entire post 1980’s contemporary films of Eric Rohmer.
What if anything on earth links all of these films? The leading character is usually an attractive single man, who is an outsider with something to prove to himself if not to others. The main obstacle to achieving his goal is his own temperament - there’s a sequence in Grand Prix with James Garner and Toshiro Mifune about exactly that - and once he learns to overcome his own weakness, he gets the girl (Four Weddings), wins the Championship (Grand Prix), solves the case (Last Seen Wearing, The Long Goodbye), wins the trial (A Few Good Men). That’s one theme.
The other is about deciding to commit oneself. In The General’s Daughter, Travolta has to decide to be a policeman first and an Army man and maverick second; Basquiat has to decided to come out hiding when opportunity - in the form of Annina Nosei - comes visiting, and then throwing yourself headlong into the work; Dogtown (and The Great Escape and The Warriors) is about the unexpected rewards of excellence achieved for its own sake, and the value of having a bunch of Bros dedicated to the same thing.
An American In Paris is almost the opposite of all this: it’s a film is about a bunch of modestly talented middle-aged dreamers who will never really make anything of themselves (except the French stage star, who has, if that’s your idea of artistic success). It’s about and for all the middle-aged men who haven’t quite succumbed to the living death of normal life but can’t really break out into the life they want. It says that if you do that, you’ll have to wait for Leslie Caron to change her mind at the last moment and come rushing back to you. Which is why those are called “fairy-tale endings”.
Thursday, 6 August 2015
Four Panoramas in London
I'm starting to like the panorama feature on iPhones and more recent cameras. For one thing, it's a lot closer to how I see the world. My peripheral vision when not focusing on a screen is darn nearly 180 degrees. Looking at a regular photograph, even landscape, always feels like looking through a window.
From top to bottom: one of the Pen Ponds in Richmond Park; Primrose Street; Spitalfields Market; Millennium Bridge, view upstream.
From top to bottom: one of the Pen Ponds in Richmond Park; Primrose Street; Spitalfields Market; Millennium Bridge, view upstream.
Monday, 3 August 2015
Why the UK Taxpayer is NOT Making A Profit on the Lloyds sale
It seems that everyone is delighted with the continuing sale by the Government of its once 43% stake in Lloyds Bank. If all goes well, say the journalists, prompted by the Treasury, “the taxpayer” will make a £7bn profit on the sale. Well, no, not exactly. You see, the sales are to the large institutions. They get their money from the trees that grow in their basements, or the Chinese, or maybe Russian oligarchs. No. They don’t. They get their money from you and me, UK pension scheme contributors. Which means we, through the institutions, are buying those shares for our pension schemes, at a higher price than we did when the UK Government used our tax monies (or loans guaranteed by our tax monies made by institutions who had previously got the money from us) to buy the shares from the market back in 2008.
In other words, we’re paying twice, because the Treasury isn’t going to return the money it used to by those Lloyds shares the first time. We’re not making a profit of £7bn, it’s the Treasury. Are we going to get a one-off rebate of £7bn / 30m taxpayers = £230 next year? That would be a NO.
Do the Treasury know that the they are making £7bn from the taxpayer? I’m almost certain they do. Do the journalists? I’m almost certain they don’t. Gotta be worth that £13.50 a week subscription.
In other words, we’re paying twice, because the Treasury isn’t going to return the money it used to by those Lloyds shares the first time. We’re not making a profit of £7bn, it’s the Treasury. Are we going to get a one-off rebate of £7bn / 30m taxpayers = £230 next year? That would be a NO.
Do the Treasury know that the they are making £7bn from the taxpayer? I’m almost certain they do. Do the journalists? I’m almost certain they don’t. Gotta be worth that £13.50 a week subscription.
Thursday, 30 July 2015
Monday, 27 July 2015
Minimum Wage, Subsidised Childcare and Middle-Class Lobbying
Two editorials in The Economist this weekend that roused my ire. One on the folly of raising minimum wages, and another on the need for subsidised child care to maintain a country’s population. The two are linked. Not by any economic theory, but by the class interest of the journalists and interns who write for The Economist. The people who write for The Economist want cheap tradesmen to work on their St John’s Wood flats, cheap nannies to look after the children so that Charlotte can go back to her career as a consultant at Accenture, and, of course, more immigrants. Lots of immigrants. But that’s another subject.
Anglo governments are talking about minimum wages because the overwhelming majority of low-paid workers are women and immigrants, two constituencies which are seen as block votes with a tendency to turn left. It’s also because Governments are getting tired giving tax subsidies to low-paid workers which end up in the profit line of large companies who then: cut jobs; create social uncertainty; sell, make or provide goods and services of ever-decreasing quality; and generally make Governments look as though they are presiding over a decline the quality of life. It also happens to be the right thing to do: how on earth does anyone run a society when only about 20% the workforce can afford to live in an independent, adult manner? The rest have to get married or live in subsidised housing to even pretend to be living an independent life.
If you’re doing something that isn’t profitable unless you pay low wages, you probably shouldn’t be in business. Either you don’t know how to price properly, or you’re being screwed by your customers (any farmer supplying any supermarket in any country in the developed world), or you aren’t supplying something that people really want. Like Morecombe Bay cockles. Low wages are the result of bad management. It’s an entrepreneur’s job to find something people want at a price that makes it profitable when the workers are paid enough to live like adults. The reason cleaners aren’t paid a lot of money is that their clients are quite prepared to live in dusty and slightly messy conditions. A cleaner-cleaned house is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Now, if parents risked having their kids removed by social services should a random inspection find fecal matter in the toilet bowl or a trace of grime or spilled milk in the children’s room - guess how important it would be to employ a cleaner? Guess what would happen to cleaning rates? Especially if cleaners (not the agencies) had to be local-council certified first?
According to Charlotte’s editorial-writing husband Jasper, the reason Charlotte should have free child-care so she can go back to her job at Accenture is that developed countries aren’t producing enough children to keep their parents in fat pensions and luxurious healthcare when they get old. (Oddly, one way out of that is, Jasper’s editorial says is, yes, more immigrants! But I digress.) However, a declining young population is not a problem. The problem is declining GDP. Anyone who sees a declining population as irrevocably linked to declining GDP, again, probably shouldn’t be running an economy. And who says that healthy old people should be exempt from work, especially when there won’t be enough (younger and middle-aged) people to do all the work that needs doing? Keep the oldies working. When they start dying, close down what they needed to live behind them. And instead of importing more people to do low value-add jobs with a low tax take, work on figuring out how to increase GDP per capita so that the economy doesn’t shrink even while the population does. More exports and fewer imports of high-value goods would help. (It wouldn’t hurt if Vodafone, Google, Apple and others paid their due taxes either. Who cares if they go somewhere else, since they aren’t actually making a net contribution to the country? But again, I digress.)
Seriously? A magazine with the self-advertised stature of The Economist should not be lobbying for the benefit of a bunch of wanna-be BCBG’s. Perhaps if paid its staff more, they wouldn’t use its pages in such a blatant manner.
Anglo governments are talking about minimum wages because the overwhelming majority of low-paid workers are women and immigrants, two constituencies which are seen as block votes with a tendency to turn left. It’s also because Governments are getting tired giving tax subsidies to low-paid workers which end up in the profit line of large companies who then: cut jobs; create social uncertainty; sell, make or provide goods and services of ever-decreasing quality; and generally make Governments look as though they are presiding over a decline the quality of life. It also happens to be the right thing to do: how on earth does anyone run a society when only about 20% the workforce can afford to live in an independent, adult manner? The rest have to get married or live in subsidised housing to even pretend to be living an independent life.
If you’re doing something that isn’t profitable unless you pay low wages, you probably shouldn’t be in business. Either you don’t know how to price properly, or you’re being screwed by your customers (any farmer supplying any supermarket in any country in the developed world), or you aren’t supplying something that people really want. Like Morecombe Bay cockles. Low wages are the result of bad management. It’s an entrepreneur’s job to find something people want at a price that makes it profitable when the workers are paid enough to live like adults. The reason cleaners aren’t paid a lot of money is that their clients are quite prepared to live in dusty and slightly messy conditions. A cleaner-cleaned house is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Now, if parents risked having their kids removed by social services should a random inspection find fecal matter in the toilet bowl or a trace of grime or spilled milk in the children’s room - guess how important it would be to employ a cleaner? Guess what would happen to cleaning rates? Especially if cleaners (not the agencies) had to be local-council certified first?
According to Charlotte’s editorial-writing husband Jasper, the reason Charlotte should have free child-care so she can go back to her job at Accenture is that developed countries aren’t producing enough children to keep their parents in fat pensions and luxurious healthcare when they get old. (Oddly, one way out of that is, Jasper’s editorial says is, yes, more immigrants! But I digress.) However, a declining young population is not a problem. The problem is declining GDP. Anyone who sees a declining population as irrevocably linked to declining GDP, again, probably shouldn’t be running an economy. And who says that healthy old people should be exempt from work, especially when there won’t be enough (younger and middle-aged) people to do all the work that needs doing? Keep the oldies working. When they start dying, close down what they needed to live behind them. And instead of importing more people to do low value-add jobs with a low tax take, work on figuring out how to increase GDP per capita so that the economy doesn’t shrink even while the population does. More exports and fewer imports of high-value goods would help. (It wouldn’t hurt if Vodafone, Google, Apple and others paid their due taxes either. Who cares if they go somewhere else, since they aren’t actually making a net contribution to the country? But again, I digress.)
Seriously? A magazine with the self-advertised stature of The Economist should not be lobbying for the benefit of a bunch of wanna-be BCBG’s. Perhaps if paid its staff more, they wouldn’t use its pages in such a blatant manner.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)