The Universal Labour Era

An interesting People News piece on a Chinese government push for the elderly to re-enter the workforce, a move towards what is being called the 'universal labour era'. 

Shanghai Issues 'Work Urging Order' to the Elderly: Is the Social Security Fund Running Dry?

In the vibrant city of Shanghai, known as the most prosperous and astute city in China, a peculiar event has unfolded in recent days. Zhang, who was born in 1962 and just celebrated his 64th birthday, found himself unexpectedly urged by the government to return to work. After navigating through waves of layoffs and stock market fluctuations, he is now set to restart his life in the latter half as a 'senior intern.' The government's push for the elderly to re-enter the workforce has quickly become a trending topic.

On March 19, 28 departments in Shanghai collaborated to issue a document, delivering a 'work urging order' to the elderly. This initiative not only responds to the call of the Two Sessions but also serves as a form of 'self-rescue' by the government in light of a 35 billion yuan pension shortfall...

The document from Shanghai is certainly not an isolated incident. It marks the beginning of the entire nation transitioning into the 'universal labour era' as the mainland gradually implements delayed retirement policies.

The Hard Realities of Honesty

…for the first time it occurred to her that science was honesty, and that honesty was a great liberator. It cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense, but it left clean wounds which would heal quickly without scars, leaving life whole and sane and cured. It could make people less miserable because it dealt with hard realities, instead of the unwholesome putrescence of dead moralities, and the high sentimental purities which had ruined so many lives.

Louis Bromfield – Twenty-Four Hours (1930)


Suppose we divide the political spectrum between two extremes of honest and dishonest rather than Left and Right - which is a dishonest spectrum to begin with. 

The trouble is, and this immediately pops up, is that the honest end of an imaginary political spectrum would be apolitical and the spectrum would become –

Political >>>> Apolitical

Okay - suppose we move on and change the Louis Bromfield quote to –

…for the first time it occurred to her that honesty was a great liberator. It cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense, but it left clean wounds which would heal quickly without scars, leaving life whole and sane and cured. It could make people less miserable because it dealt with hard realities, instead of the unwholesome putrescence of dead moralities, and the high sentimental purities which had ruined so many lives.

Indeed – honesty is a great liberator. You know it and I know it, especially in these troubled times. Science and numerous other pursuits can be great liberators if they are based on honesty and they cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense.

Therein lies the problem of course, our culture has been based around a certain level of honesty in certain areas, but the hard realities of honesty have not been applied to politics or social status. We do not cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense even when we know or merely suspect that we should.

Unfortunately honesty is not some kind of panacea. Obviously it is common enough to be honestly mistaken and honestly uncertain, but honesty can at least be an ideal against which we assess narratives, ideas and assumptions. This is probably why we have political ideologies of course, to evade the hard realities of honesty. 

Ideology allows politicians to stand up and tell the most egregious lies, spin the most shamefully misleading narratives and foster the unwholesome putrescence of concocted moralities.

And we know it.

Sighs of relief all round

UK ministers begin contingency planning amid economic fears over Iran war

Donald Trump has branded the UK and other Nato allies “cowards” but anger is growing among cabinet ministers that his war in Iran could jeopardise Britain’s fragile finances.

Senior members of the government are in despair about the potential effects on the economy, with experts warning of higher energy prices and mortgage and borrowing costs.

They have already begun contingency planning in case the conflict is protracted, including considering lowering speed limits to minimise fuel consumption.


The blame game ramps up as we knew it would - make the plebs conform to something futile to hammer home the message. It's always the way.

The lower speed limits wheeze pinched from the 1973 oil crisis is a good one. Don't let the plebs handle it themselves by adjusting their own travel arrangements - that's no use for the blame game. It's no use for the status game either, but that's a game which never ends.

Keir Starmer and Rachel from Accounts must be relieved, but many others will jump in with their favourite narratives. Mad Ed is bound to.

Words v Action

EU summit ends in strong words but little action

European Union leaders emerged yesterday from a 12-hour summit overshadowed by two wars on Europe’s doorstep, yet with little to show beyond rhetoric...

European Council President António Costa attempted to frame the stakes in stark terms, arguing that upholding the international rules-based order was essential because “the alternative is chaos” and “if you want to preserve peace, we need to uphold the international law and uphold the multilateral system”. He explicitly pointed to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East as examples of what is at risk.

That sense of urgency, though, did not translate into action.

As we know, lots of people in the UK favour reaffirming our marriage vows with this lot, including that strange chap who pretends to be UK Prime Minister. Maybe demonstrations of obvious irrelevance such as this will change attitudes, but it doesn't seem likely.

Hypnodosh

Kristian Niemietz has a useful Critic piece on Zack Polanski and his plans to dazzle low carbon voters with yet more incoherence. This time it's economics. 


Zackonomics is incoherent and outdated

Zack Polanski is a great political entrepreneur but he is terrible at economics

So this is it. Zackonomics.

Today, Green Party leader Zack Polanski outlined his economic philosophy at an event organised by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). I will not pretend that I was listening with a completely open mind: I mostly made up my mind about Zackonomics on the day when Polanski said that his three favourite economists were Gary Stevenson, Richard Murphy and Grace Blakeley.

My issue with that is not that all three of those are completely wrong about economics (although they are). It’s that they are all wrong in very different, and mutually incompatible ways. You can be a fan of each of them in isolation (although you really shouldn’t), but you cannot, in a meaningful way, be a fan of all three of them at the same time.

The whole piece is worth reading as a reminder that numbers sometimes matter a great deal. The number of useful idiots who vote for example.  

I could go on, but I realise that I am missing the point by judging Zackonomics by the standards of a conventional economic policy programme. Zack Polanski may be terrible at economics, but he is a great entrepreneur — a political entrepreneur, that is. The lesson from Corbynmania, the Greta Thunberg movement, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the gender movement and the Palestine movement is that there is a lot of vaguely youthful, vaguely left-wing, vaguely anti-capitalist political energy around. That energy was looking for a political outlet, a gap in the market which Polanski spotted and filled. I wish he had used his talents to become an actual entrepreneur in the private sector instead, creating wealth rather than promoting ideas that destroy it.

Ed cracks another joke

Ed Miliband calls for fairness in business energy contracts amid Iran crisis

Energy firms have been warned not to rip off businesses as the Middle East crisis forces prices up.

Regulator Ofgem and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband have written to business suppliers to demand “maximum flexibility” in contracts for small firms.

Mr Miliband said pricing needs to be “fair, transparent and fully justifiable”.

Mad as a box of frogs.

Residential mining