Ferdinand Mount has a fascinating article, fascinating at least for a man known for his support for the Conservative Party, in the Evening Standard today. He urges companies to top up low wages.
He is right, of course, that the state can't carry on subsidising low wages through the welfare system as they are currently doing. As he so rightly points out, this is how the Speenhamland system of outdoor relief worked in the eighteenth century - except that it didn't work.
Subsidising business is rarely an effective way forward, and it is completely unsustainable for taxpayers to be asked to subsidise bad employers in this way. That is as good a reason as any why we have a deficit.
Mount's recent books about the way in which successive governments have created a new class of mega-rich has opened up a fascinating new divide in politics, at least as interesting as demonstrators camping outside St Paul's.
He is gargling with the word 'pre-distribution' just as Ed Miliband is. This is an idea whose time as come.
But there is a problem around his contention that the government can't regulate and that "companies have to work out a solution between their accountants and their consciences".
He is quite right that we may prefer to shop at stores that pay living wages, and shun the companies where we are already paying for them to employ people on low wages.
That works, but only as long as we have the choice. None of that kind of pressure can work where we have allowed monopolies to grow up. In the recent furore about tax avoidance, the three companies that really took the pressure - Google, Amazon and Starbucks - showed exactly what will happen. Starbucks still has competitors and it caved into public pressure. Google and Amazon don't, and they rode out the storm.
Monopoly power is the key issue, and it is a traditional Liberal issue which the Liberals and their successors have quietly ignored for too long.
There was something about 1954
What was it about 1954? It marked the end of wartime rationing in the UK. the closure of Ellis Island and the opening of the first Burger King. Not to mention the fall of Senator McCarthy. And the Four Minute Mile.
None of that quite justifies the idea that it was the year of the birth of the modern world. But I was wondering about it last night when I went to see the revival of Julian Slade's Salad Days at the Riverside Studios - which was absolutely fabulous. There was something about 1954.
Perhaps I have inherited that feeling from my parents, who kind of emerged into the world around that time. Salad Days was important to them, with its nervous sense of trying to find something to do after 'coming down' from university. So was the other product of 1954, the comedy about the Brighton Vintage Car Rally, Genevieve.
The computer Evi designated 11 April 1954 as the most boring year in the twentieth century, and I wondered if that had something to do with it. It was nine years after the end of World War II, and both Salad Days and Genevieve were about the new generation emerging who really had nothing to do with it except watch. The very dullness of 1954 provided its charm. Periods of international excitement don't produce summer fantasies like Salad Days.
There is some hint of the dawning new Elizabethan Age, a year after the coronation. The generation looked ahead rather than looked back.
I was completely captivated by the production at the Riverside Studios, but it had two big differences from the 1954 original. What might have been normal speech patterns back then seems like a cut glass accent to us now. Not using microphones then was just the way things were in the musical theatre; to us, it feels like a new level of authenticity.
But we are post-modern these days, so we are all of us experts in reading the cultural subtitling. I loved it, and - perhaps because I was born into that world four years later - I felt it said something about me, if only I could have read further between the lines.
Infectious carriers of functional stupidity
There was a fascinating article in the Financial Times a few days ago, about the 'right kind of stupidity'.
It describes the idea of 'functional stupidity', conceived by Mats Alvesson and Andrew Spicer, describing the 'bovine state' which organisations can sink into - large organisations in particular. The idea is that organisations which attract particularly clever staff, like banks and management consultancies, are particularly prone to the kind of 'functional stupidity' that overwhelmed the Soviet Union.
Or as the UBS chief put it about the Libor rate fixing scandal: "A mechanistic reliance on risk processes".
The insight that which the FT's Andrew Hill brings to this debate is that organisations need a bit of functional stupidity just to get by, otherwise you have clever people questioning everything. You need agreed processes.
What he doesn't say is that agreed processes is, paradoxically, exactly the route by which organisations also become 'functionally stupid'. That is why it is the large organisations, which need processes just to survive, that are the most prone to it. Vision is clearer in small organisations. So is a sense of responsibility.
But the debate so far, at least as set out in the FT, doesn't cover the most ferocious method that organisations become functionally stupid. They boil their objectives down into numerical targets - or, worse, the government does it for them - that purport to measure everything. This is Taylorism, and Taylorism famously asks employees to leave their brains at reception, to be picked up on the way home.
The explanation for the staggering ineffectiveness of so many services in the first decade of this century was this very reliance on numerical targets. Like nearly everybody else, I haven't read the long-awaited report on the way older patients were abused at Mid Staffordshire Hospital, but it seems a clear cut case of functional stupidity brought on by an over-reliance on targets.
Targets appear to simplify the task for staff. It makes them concentrate on bowlderised versions of the job. Too simple means stupid.
This is important when it comes to working out how public services can be more effective. Management consultancies which have pushed the idea of breaking processes down into numbers have been, not just a terrible waste of money - but they have also been infectious carriers of functional stupidity.
It describes the idea of 'functional stupidity', conceived by Mats Alvesson and Andrew Spicer, describing the 'bovine state' which organisations can sink into - large organisations in particular. The idea is that organisations which attract particularly clever staff, like banks and management consultancies, are particularly prone to the kind of 'functional stupidity' that overwhelmed the Soviet Union.
Or as the UBS chief put it about the Libor rate fixing scandal: "A mechanistic reliance on risk processes".
The insight that which the FT's Andrew Hill brings to this debate is that organisations need a bit of functional stupidity just to get by, otherwise you have clever people questioning everything. You need agreed processes.
What he doesn't say is that agreed processes is, paradoxically, exactly the route by which organisations also become 'functionally stupid'. That is why it is the large organisations, which need processes just to survive, that are the most prone to it. Vision is clearer in small organisations. So is a sense of responsibility.
But the debate so far, at least as set out in the FT, doesn't cover the most ferocious method that organisations become functionally stupid. They boil their objectives down into numerical targets - or, worse, the government does it for them - that purport to measure everything. This is Taylorism, and Taylorism famously asks employees to leave their brains at reception, to be picked up on the way home.
The explanation for the staggering ineffectiveness of so many services in the first decade of this century was this very reliance on numerical targets. Like nearly everybody else, I haven't read the long-awaited report on the way older patients were abused at Mid Staffordshire Hospital, but it seems a clear cut case of functional stupidity brought on by an over-reliance on targets.
Targets appear to simplify the task for staff. It makes them concentrate on bowlderised versions of the job. Too simple means stupid.
This is important when it comes to working out how public services can be more effective. Management consultancies which have pushed the idea of breaking processes down into numbers have been, not just a terrible waste of money - but they have also been infectious carriers of functional stupidity.
house speculation isn't good news, really
The Evening Standard led today on the news that £600 million of flats have been sold in a four day kerfuffle around the new development at Battersea Power Station. The implication is that this is evidence of some kind of recovery.
It isn't. It is evidence of just how much our distorted economy depends on speculators. Our increasingly unaffordable homes market, just like the inflationary food market, increasingly pricing out more swathes of the population, is the result.
Whether it is the housing rules that allow foreign speculators to buy up homes in London and leave them empty, or whether it is Barclay's domination of the food speculation market, speculation is impoverishing us.
The speculative froth is increasingly distanced from people's real lives. It isn't evidence of emerging health, it is evidence of deepening sickness.
It isn't. It is evidence of just how much our distorted economy depends on speculators. Our increasingly unaffordable homes market, just like the inflationary food market, increasingly pricing out more swathes of the population, is the result.
Whether it is the housing rules that allow foreign speculators to buy up homes in London and leave them empty, or whether it is Barclay's domination of the food speculation market, speculation is impoverishing us.
The speculative froth is increasingly distanced from people's real lives. It isn't evidence of emerging health, it is evidence of deepening sickness.
The benefits of radio call-ins
Mark Pack has blogged about the latest poll which, after his LBC show, seems to give Nick Clegg a much deserved boost. I have an even less scientific basis for judging the impact: conversation at the school gates.
It was remarkably positive. Someone I met even said: "I didn't know he had done all those good things."
It makes me wonder whether bypassing the extraordinarily narrow lens of the conventional political media may turn out to be the only way that a politician can now get their message across.
It was remarkably positive. Someone I met even said: "I didn't know he had done all those good things."
It makes me wonder whether bypassing the extraordinarily narrow lens of the conventional political media may turn out to be the only way that a politician can now get their message across.
We need to be able to 'conquer unemployment' again
Mark Pack has written a characteristically intelligent newsletter about the current positioning of the Lib Dems, around the idea of being a moderating influence on both sides. As he says, this has the advantage of being patently true and a good description of an effective junior coalition partner. But there is something about the combination of efficient economy and social concern which doesn't quite cut it as a political message.
Yes, it describes the effective position of the Lib Dems and the Liberals before them, just as it provided the message for the most successful of the SDP political broadcasts in the 1980s. What it fails to do is to explain what the connection between the two objectives is. It looks like compromise.There are two reasons why, as Liberals, we should not be content with this as a narrative for the party.
First, it is the very opposite of a big idea. It may carry conviction among voters temporarily, but what it will not do is provide the party with the intellectual engine it needs to WIN - or to attract the activists of tomorrow, and the people who are prepared to devote their lives to cajolling the Liberals into power.
The second problem is that the words' efficient economy' covers up the basic problem which is that, not spending too much and being 'sensible' with the economy does not do justice to the traditional Liberal position on the economy.
It doesn't do justice to the emerging industrial policy that Vince Cable is presiding over. Nor does it do justice to the idea of a small-scale economy that can revive local fortunes from the bottom up, as Danny Alexander is beginning to develop.
The truth is that the Lib Dems badly need a central organising economic idea. They have survived for too long now on a bundle of issues around fairness and civil liberties, which - although important - are not winning reasons for government.
David Lloyd George, whose 150th birthday is coming up, used the slogan 'we can conquer unemployment' in the 1929 general election, using the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to provided it with its intellectual underpinning. Until the Lib Dems can say that again, they will just be a glorified pressure group.
Is the Hobbit quite 'real'?
The novelist Umberto Eco was an early adopter in the great debate about authenticity. After a trip around California, constantly being urged to look at strange three-dimensional versions of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper - all hyped as 'better than the real thing' - he wrote an essay called 'Travels in hyper-reality'.
Since then, the world of hyper-reality is all around us. It is in the catwalk models we are supposed to look like, the doctored photographs on the front of magazines, and especially in the cinema.
I have just been to see Peter Jackson's film The Hobbit, which is a little long - though the dragon is rather fabulous - but the portrayal of the Shire, home of Bilbo Baggins, has definitely been given the hyper-real treatment. The colours are altered to make it more lush than real. They is something sugary about it that sticks in the mouth.
Perhaps it is contradictory of me to demand that the portrayal of something as mystical and fantastical as The Hobbit should be real, but I am not so sure. The Shire was rooted in Englishness, and intended to be, and there was a hint of idealised Englishness about it. Yet it was very down-to-earth kind of Englishness, not the kind you expect to be shot through some schmaltzy green tinged lens.
Also, we have to take into account Tolkien's own views on authenticity:
"The notion that motor cars are more 'alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious... for my part I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley Station is more 'real' than the clouds and as an artefect I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven."
But none of this suggests that everything Tolkien wrote needs to be served up to us as a caricature of itself. I find I can''t believe it that way.
Since then, the world of hyper-reality is all around us. It is in the catwalk models we are supposed to look like, the doctored photographs on the front of magazines, and especially in the cinema.
I have just been to see Peter Jackson's film The Hobbit, which is a little long - though the dragon is rather fabulous - but the portrayal of the Shire, home of Bilbo Baggins, has definitely been given the hyper-real treatment. The colours are altered to make it more lush than real. They is something sugary about it that sticks in the mouth.
Perhaps it is contradictory of me to demand that the portrayal of something as mystical and fantastical as The Hobbit should be real, but I am not so sure. The Shire was rooted in Englishness, and intended to be, and there was a hint of idealised Englishness about it. Yet it was very down-to-earth kind of Englishness, not the kind you expect to be shot through some schmaltzy green tinged lens.
Also, we have to take into account Tolkien's own views on authenticity:
"The notion that motor cars are more 'alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious... for my part I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley Station is more 'real' than the clouds and as an artefect I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven."
But none of this suggests that everything Tolkien wrote needs to be served up to us as a caricature of itself. I find I can''t believe it that way.
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