Asia generally acted hard and fast and it will emerge from this stronger than Europe and the US.
We are in the early stages of a geographic, economic and ontological shift.
True and the South Koreans led the way on early testing, however economic power was shifting to Asia anyway. Pressure must be put on China though to improve its sanitation in its meat markets and the safety of its labs.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
Thanks. Yes, I have submitted that but I'm not optimistic. If it leads to a fairly calculated and promptly applied discount I will eat my socks. So here's hoping for a sock sandwich!
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Which is not good enough - the delays in starting stoping the system are bad enough.
I want a UBI to replace the tax free allowance - everyone gets it, all the time. Paid directly by the government. It would never be withdrawn or cut - for any reason.
Disability etc would be a separate system on top.
Any money you earn would be taxed - from the first pound. But it would always increase your income.
I have followed the governments advice from day one, ordered my parents to stay in, clapped for the NHS at the front door at 8pm tonight, the whole shebang... but am I really the only one on here who doesn’t have nagging doubts that the 24hr news cycle, the tabloid headlines, the way of human nature to be preoccupied with catastrophe might mean we are over reacting?
I feel slightly like one of the Peoples Temple folk who drank the pretend poison Jim Jones gave them to test their loyalty before the kool aid came out
Normalcy bias is very hard to shift. Even tho i first identified this bias here on PB, I still suffer from it. Sometimes I walk out of my door, and think, “WTF, let’s go back to London. Have a nice lunch. This is absurd.”
But this isn’t absurd. This is a virus with the potential to collapse societies, via their health systems. Those are the cold hard facts, as we see in Wuhan, Italy and Spain.
We cannot deny it.
I still say if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic. We hear the line that ‘flu has a vaccine’ as if that makes it harmless, but it still kills more people than this disease is likely to each year,
What - it kills 500,000 per year in the UK alone? My God, that means 80% of all deaths in this country are from flu.
No, wait. They're not.
The reason this virus is scary is because if we don't do massively disruptive things, it will kill more people in this country in one season than died in all of World War II. Military and civilian alike.
That could be why there's a little bit of concern about it.
The ridiculousness of Isam's comment really doesn't need exposing. Leave it there and as each day passes it will shrivel under the intensity of its self-immolation.
No offence, Isam
None taken, happy to leave it there and see how it ages
The point being nothing to do with Coronavirus, but that “if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic.”
Correct. There's plenty of fake news on here as well as elsewhere form those with agendas sadly.
Agreed main piece of fake news from this bloke on 18/3/20 I will let you decide if he had an Agenda or not.
"We're massively increasing the testing to see whether you have it now and ramping up daily testing from 5,000 a day, to 10,000 to 25,000 and then up at 250,000," - B Johnson
Better news from Lombardy - the increase yesterday was due to an excess of tests from previous days and the premier confirms the number of new cases has indeed stabilised.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is virtually immune to benefit fraud.
Is it just me or are people getting slightly carried away thinking that we’ve already got this bug defeated? Lots of talk about what we do when this ends and things schools going back for the summer term. We still have weeks of this and the damage has not peaked yet.
I worry about the psychology at play. Reminds me when I once got excited about the Christmas holiday in October. It was a long old slog.
Its more the cure is nearly as bad as the disease.
I guess it’s generally preferable to be poor than dead. The trick is to avoid both.
But is 99 not-poor people and 1 dead better or worse than 100 poor all alive? I know those numbers are simplistic but that's the sort of trade off we are talking about.
"...100 poor...", Lol!
There are large swathes of the population who will hardly become 'poor' as a result of this, a bit poorer maybe but not poor.
Ironically, many of the genuine poor are likely to be just a little less poor for a few weeks due to this:
"...for a single Universal Credit claimant (aged 25 or over), the standard allowance will increase from £317.82 to £409.89 per month."
I have followed the governments advice from day one, ordered my parents to stay in, clapped for the NHS at the front door at 8pm tonight, the whole shebang... but am I really the only one on here who doesn’t have nagging doubts that the 24hr news cycle, the tabloid headlines, the way of human nature to be preoccupied with catastrophe might mean we are over reacting?
I feel slightly like one of the Peoples Temple folk who drank the pretend poison Jim Jones gave them to test their loyalty before the kool aid came out
Normalcy bias is very hard to shift. Even tho i first identified this bias here on PB, I still suffer from it. Sometimes I walk out of my door, and think, “WTF, let’s go back to London. Have a nice lunch. This is absurd.”
But this isn’t absurd. This is a virus with the potential to collapse societies, via their health systems. Those are the cold hard facts, as we see in Wuhan, Italy and Spain.
We cannot deny it.
I still say if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic. We hear the line that ‘flu has a vaccine’ as if that makes it harmless, but it still kills more people than this disease is likely to each year,
What - it kills 500,000 per year in the UK alone? My God, that means 80% of all deaths in this country are from flu.
No, wait. They're not.
The reason this virus is scary is because if we don't do massively disruptive things, it will kill more people in this country in one season than died in all of World War II. Military and civilian alike.
That could be why there's a little bit of concern about it.
Anyone who thought that the response has been an over reaction needs to sit and watch the news over the next week. This is going to get much worse before it gets better. More through luck than design the UK will be less affected than most other G7 nations.
PS I think the new figure of 20,000 UK deaths is maybe still too high. I would suggest around 5,000.
Yesterday an expert said that 5,700 was possible. I can't remember which one.
That was the well-known scientist Andrew Neil
No it wasn’t, it was Professor William Pike of Imperial College
a) Nothing on DC pensions where people have these in a drawdown, which is the norm these days outside of the public sector. If your pot is slashed and you are currently taking a pension, it won't matter if markets recover if you have had to take a disproportion amount out now to maintain your income. I can't see any solution to this. Even if the Govt makes payment to these pensioners so they don't have to take money now, how long can they do that for? For employees and self employed it will last until this is over. For DC pensioners it might last years after (hopefully not).
b) Anything for single person limited companies? I notice comments yesterday about them being tax avoiders on here. For most this is not true. Some are forced into contracting by their clients (in reality IR35 cases). Most aren't contractors but running proper businesses (as I used to). At any one time I had around 150 customers. I was legally an employee, although in practice self employed and I ploughed the profits back into the business. I would have therefore failed to qualify under either arrangement. As it happens I am now retired and probably wouldn't have qualified for other reasons and wouldn't have wanted to; but for others?
c) What the hell was Alok Sharma talking about on the TV this morning stating that average self employed person with profits of £50K has earnings of £200K. Sounds like he doesn't know what profits and earnings are or lives in cloud cuckooland. As it happens I don't disagree with the £50K limit and actually think the bailout for employees and self employed at 80% is actually too generous, but he gives the impression of not having a clue.
On (a), the government might permit as a short term crisis measure something that is commercially available to me on my non-pension investments. My manager allows me, if I so wish, to borrow against the value of my investments at under 2%pa APR. I don't need to, but if I were needing to draw down right now, I'd prefer to do that than cash in investments. In the current exceptional circumstances, the government might for a limited period permit borrowings up to say 25% of the value of the pension pot for those who formed the same view as me. This would be free for the government (maybe even good for public finances if it kept people from drawing state benefits later) and potentially popular.
I have followed the governments advice from day one, ordered my parents to stay in, clapped for the NHS at the front door at 8pm tonight, the whole shebang... but am I really the only one on here who doesn’t have nagging doubts that the 24hr news cycle, the tabloid headlines, the way of human nature to be preoccupied with catastrophe might mean we are over reacting?
I feel slightly like one of the Peoples Temple folk who drank the pretend poison Jim Jones gave them to test their loyalty before the kool aid came out
Normalcy bias is very hard to shift. Even tho i first identified this bias here on PB, I still suffer from it. Sometimes I walk out of my door, and think, “WTF, let’s go back to London. Have a nice lunch. This is absurd.”
But this isn’t absurd. This is a virus with the potential to collapse societies, via their health systems. Those are the cold hard facts, as we see in Wuhan, Italy and Spain.
We cannot deny it.
I still say if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic. We hear the line that ‘flu has a vaccine’ as if that makes it harmless, but it still kills more people than this disease is likely to each year,
What - it kills 500,000 per year in the UK alone? My God, that means 80% of all deaths in this country are from flu.
No, wait. They're not.
The reason this virus is scary is because if we don't do massively disruptive things, it will kill more people in this country in one season than died in all of World War II. Military and civilian alike.
That could be why there's a little bit of concern about it.
Anyone who thought that the response has been an over reaction needs to sit and watch the news over the next week. This is going to get much worse before it gets better. More through luck than design the UK will be less affected than most other G7 nations.
PS I think the new figure of 20,000 UK deaths is maybe still too high. I would suggest around 5,000.
With two thirds of those having their departure this year hastened?
A long lockdown is like reverse Darwinism - sacrifice the young and productive to protect the old.
Another term would be Socialsim.
How are the young and productive being sacrificed?
Their earnings have been smashed or jobs removed.
More delay to getting on housing ladder.
Pension funds left bleeding.
Huge debts thrusted upon them which will take years to pay off.
And lack of career opportunities for school leaves due to a smashed economy. On the social side, the loss of being able to socialise and romance with others, witnessing mounting tensions at home due to lockdown, exam issue, loss of schooling for at least one term .. and on ... and on.
Better news from Lombardy - the increase yesterday was due to an excess of tests from previous days and the premier confirms the number of new cases has indeed stabilised.
Yes, the Italian figures, while awful, do seem to be stabilising. It looks like their lockdown is starting to bear fruit. There is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is immune to benefit fraud.
Exactly - one poverty trap, is having to turn off benefits correctly, wait for the first pay check etc. If done wrong you are in trouble. If done right you may have to live on nothing for a period of time.
A proper UBI setup fixes this - you don't need to even tell the UBI delivery outfit that you have got a job or lost one. That's just a tax thing.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is immune to benefit fraud.
I have followed the governments advice from day one, ordered my parents to stay in, clapped for the NHS at the front door at 8pm tonight, the whole shebang... but am I really the only one on here who doesn’t have nagging doubts that the 24hr news cycle, the tabloid headlines, the way of human nature to be preoccupied with catastrophe might mean we are over reacting?
I feel slightly like one of the Peoples Temple folk who drank the pretend poison Jim Jones gave them to test their loyalty before the kool aid came out
Normalcy bias is very hard to shift. Even tho i first identified this bias here on PB, I still suffer from it. Sometimes I walk out of my door, and think, “WTF, let’s go back to London. Have a nice lunch. This is absurd.”
But this isn’t absurd. This is a virus with the potential to collapse societies, via their health systems. Those are the cold hard facts, as we see in Wuhan, Italy and Spain.
We cannot deny it.
I still say if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic. We hear the line that ‘flu has a vaccine’ as if that makes it harmless, but it still kills more people than this disease is likely to each year,
What - it kills 500,000 per year in the UK alone? My God, that means 80% of all deaths in this country are from flu.
No, wait. They're not.
The reason this virus is scary is because if we don't do massively disruptive things, it will kill more people in this country in one season than died in all of World War II. Military and civilian alike.
That could be why there's a little bit of concern about it.
World war deaths are more terrifying and more scary however, and often more traumatic and horrible. Further, they were generally “lost” lives - i.e. young people who’d otherwise have lived for decades more as opposed to being skewed to the elderly who might have passed on in 6-18 months of ‘something else’ anyway.
Finally, WW2 deaths were against a population of c.40 million not c.65 million so the ratio was far higher.
Note that if it ran unchecked, the proportion of deaths amongst the younger would be a lot higher. The young are far more likely to pull through if they need intensive care. If the NHS is overloaded to that degree, they won't get it.
About half of all those admitted to intensive care are age 20-64. These wouldn't have likely passed on that soon. About an eighth are age 20-44. Not a huge number, but still quite frightening if left unchecked. The large majority of that half aged 20-64 would pull through with help. If 500,000 came down with it in three months or so, they wouldn't get it.
It would be a higher death rate per month amongst those 20-64 year olds than any three months of WWII
Better news from Lombardy - the increase yesterday was due to an excess of tests from previous days and the premier confirms the number of new cases has indeed stabilised.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is immune to benefit fraud.
I have followed the governments advice from day one, ordered my parents to stay in, clapped for the NHS at the front door at 8pm tonight, the whole shebang... but am I really the only one on here who doesn’t have nagging doubts that the 24hr news cycle, the tabloid headlines, the way of human nature to be preoccupied with catastrophe might mean we are over reacting?
I feel slightly like one of the Peoples Temple folk who drank the pretend poison Jim Jones gave them to test their loyalty before the kool aid came out
Normalcy bias is very hard to shift. Even tho i first identified this bias here on PB, I still suffer from it. Sometimes I walk out of my door, and think, “WTF, let’s go back to London. Have a nice lunch. This is absurd.”
But this isn’t absurd. This is a virus with the potential to collapse societies, via their health systems. Those are the cold hard facts, as we see in Wuhan, Italy and Spain.
We cannot deny it.
I still say if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic. We hear the line that ‘flu has a vaccine’ as if that makes it harmless, but it still kills more people than this disease is likely to each year,
What - it kills 500,000 per year in the UK alone? My God, that means 80% of all deaths in this country are from flu.
No, wait. They're not.
The reason this virus is scary is because if we don't do massively disruptive things, it will kill more people in this country in one season than died in all of World War II. Military and civilian alike.
That could be why there's a little bit of concern about it.
Anyone who thought that the response has been an over reaction needs to sit and watch the news over the next week. This is going to get much worse before it gets better. More through luck than design the UK will be less affected than most other G7 nations.
PS I think the new figure of 20,000 UK deaths is maybe still too high. I would suggest around 5,000.
With two thirds of those having their departure this year hastened?
A long lockdown is like reverse Darwinism - sacrifice the young and productive to protect the old.
Another term would be Socialsim.
How are the young and productive being sacrificed?
Their earnings have been smashed or jobs removed.
More delay to getting on housing ladder.
Pension funds left bleeding.
Huge debts thrusted upon them which will take years to pay off.
Says it all... you worry about money while most of the country, including HMG it seems, worry about people's lives.
In any event, letting this virus run unchecked would have a far more serious economic impact than any caused by the government's actions.
I am not a Tory, anything but, but I'd give the government 7 or 8/10 for their handling of this to date.
I have followed the governments advice from day one, ordered my parents to stay in, clapped for the NHS at the front door at 8pm tonight, the whole shebang... but am I really the only one on here who doesn’t have nagging doubts that the 24hr news cycle, the tabloid headlines, the way of human nature to be preoccupied with catastrophe might mean we are over reacting?
I feel slightly like one of the Peoples Temple folk who drank the pretend poison Jim Jones gave them to test their loyalty before the kool aid came out
Normalcy bias is very hard to shift. Even tho i first identified this bias here on PB, I still suffer from it. Sometimes I walk out of my door, and think, “WTF, let’s go back to London. Have a nice lunch. This is absurd.”
But this isn’t absurd. This is a virus with the potential to collapse societies, via their health systems. Those are the cold hard facts, as we see in Wuhan, Italy and Spain.
We cannot deny it.
I still say if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic. We hear the line that ‘flu has a vaccine’ as if that makes it harmless, but it still kills more people than this disease is likely to each year,
What - it kills 500,000 per year in the UK alone? My God, that means 80% of all deaths in this country are from flu.
No, wait. They're not.
The reason this virus is scary is because if we don't do massively disruptive things, it will kill more people in this country in one season than died in all of World War II. Military and civilian alike.
That could be why there's a little bit of concern about it.
Anyone who thought that the response has been an over reaction needs to sit and watch the news over the next week. This is going to get much worse before it gets better. More through luck than design the UK will be less affected than most other G7 nations.
PS I think the new figure of 20,000 UK deaths is maybe still too high. I would suggest around 5,000.
With two thirds of those having their departure this year hastened?
A long lockdown is like reverse Darwinism - sacrifice the young and productive to protect the old.
Another term would be Socialsim.
How are the young and productive being sacrificed?
Their earnings have been smashed or jobs removed.
More delay to getting on housing ladder.
Pension funds left bleeding.
Huge debts thrusted upon them which will take years to pay off.
Says it all... you worry about money while most of the country, including HMG it seems, worry about people's lives.
In any event, letting this virus run unchecked would have a far more serious economic impact than any caused by the government's actions.
I am not a Tory, anything but, but I'd give the government 7 or 8/10 for their handling of this to date.
Bill Gates said it best when he pointed out that the economy is fixable, but death is harder to reverse.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is immune to benefit fraud.
c) What the hell was Alok Sharma talking about on the TV this morning stating that average self employed person with profits of £50K has earnings of £200K. Sounds like he doesn't know what profits and earnings are or lives in cloud cuckooland. As it happens I don't disagree with the £50K limit and actually think the bailout for employees and self employed at 80% is actually too generous, but he gives the impression of not having a clue.
He wasn't talking nonsense. What he was saying is that the distribution is extremely long-tailed. In other words, there is a small number of self-employed people whose annual profits (which for the self-employed is essentially the same as earnings) are over £50K, and amongst those there is a significant proportion who earn megabucks, taking the average of the over £50K cohort to an average £200K. I would imagine the mega-buck earners include top barristers, very successful authors, pop stars, etc.
Having said that, I'm not sure why the government thinks this point is terribly relevant to the discussion. It's a bit of spin to justify the £50K cut-off, but I'd have thought the cut-off would be perfectly reasonable whatever the tail of the distribution.
I agree that for some at least the package is very generous. The bit about it which hasn't received much attention is that the self-employed can get the 80% grant even if their income falls only modestly as a result of the crisis,
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is immune to benefit fraud.
it isn't immune to eligibility fraud though.
How so? Everyone is eligible.
Citizens of another country arent.
It's not exactly hard to determine who is a citizen of the UK. Or eligibility could simply be dependent on possession of an NI number. In any case, such issues are minimal compared to the labyrinthine complexities of universal credit.
c) What the hell was Alok Sharma talking about on the TV this morning stating that average self employed person with profits of £50K has earnings of £200K. Sounds like he doesn't know what profits and earnings are or lives in cloud cuckooland. As it happens I don't disagree with the £50K limit and actually think the bailout for employees and self employed at 80% is actually too generous, but he gives the impression of not having a clue.
Remember about a quarter of his colleagues in the cabinet, including the PM, have been sacked for lying or had serious scandals re lying. Perhaps he is basing this on his peers ethics.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is immune to benefit fraud.
it isn't immune to eligibility fraud though.
How so? Everyone is eligible.
Citizens of another country arent.
It's not exactly hard to determine who is a citizen of the UK. Or eligibility could simply be dependent on possession of an NI number. In any case, such issues are minimal compared to the labyrinthine complexities of universal credit.
And because peoples existence and eligibility is stable in the long term, better checking can be done. You don't need to delve into their finance, family structure etc at. All you need is proof of existence and not being dead.
Thanks. Yes, I have submitted that but I'm not optimistic. If it leads to a fairly calculated and promptly applied discount I will eat my socks. So here's hoping for a sock sandwich!
I have followed the governments advice from day one, ordered my parents to stay in, clapped for the NHS at the front door at 8pm tonight, the whole shebang... but am I really the only one on here who doesn’t have nagging doubts that the 24hr news cycle, the tabloid headlines, the way of human nature to be preoccupied with catastrophe might mean we are over reacting?
I feel slightly like one of the Peoples Temple folk who drank the pretend poison Jim Jones gave them to test their loyalty before the kool aid came out
Normalcy bias is very hard to shift. Even tho i first identified this bias here on PB, I still suffer from it. Sometimes I walk out of my door, and think, “WTF, let’s go back to London. Have a nice lunch. This is absurd.”
But this isn’t absurd. This is a virus with the potential to collapse societies, via their health systems. Those are the cold hard facts, as we see in Wuhan, Italy and Spain.
We cannot deny it.
I still say if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic. We hear the line that ‘flu has a vaccine’ as if that makes it harmless, but it still kills more people than this disease is likely to each year,
What - it kills 500,000 per year in the UK alone? My God, that means 80% of all deaths in this country are from flu.
No, wait. They're not.
The reason this virus is scary is because if we don't do massively disruptive things, it will kill more people in this country in one season than died in all of World War II. Military and civilian alike.
That could be why there's a little bit of concern about it.
The ridiculousness of Isam's comment really doesn't need exposing. Leave it there and as each day passes it will shrivel under the intensity of its self-immolation.
No offence, Isam
None taken, happy to leave it there and see how it ages
The point being nothing to do with Coronavirus, but that “if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic.”
I agree with this. It doesn't change the dynamics of where we are, nor, crucially, the necessary measures for this not to become unmanageable (if it would, which we don't know, but I can see why the govt can't take the chance), but absolutely. If every flu epidemic was written up death by death we wouldn't ever leave the house. While @eadric would long ago have booked his flight to Switzerland.
c) What the hell was Alok Sharma talking about on the TV this morning stating that average self employed person with profits of £50K has earnings of £200K. Sounds like he doesn't know what profits and earnings are or lives in cloud cuckooland. As it happens I don't disagree with the £50K limit and actually think the bailout for employees and self employed at 80% is actually too generous, but he gives the impression of not having a clue.
He wasn't talking nonsense. What he was saying is that the distribution is extremely long-tailed. In other words, there is a small number of self-employed people whose annual profits (which for the self-employed is essentially the same as earnings) are over £50K, and amongst those there is a significant proportion who earn megabucks, taking the average of the over £50K cohort to an average £200K. I would imagine the mega-buck earners include top barristers, very successful authors, pop stars, etc.
Having said that, I'm not sure why the government thinks this point is terribly relevant to the discussion. It's a bit of spin to justify the £50K cut-off, but I'd have thought the cut-off would be perfectly reasonable whatever the tail of the distribution.
I agree that for some at least the package is very generous. The bit about it which hasn't received much attention is that the self-employed can get the 80% grant even if their income falls only modestly as a result of the crisis,
I would have to go and listen again, but I didn't hear it like that, but I'll accept what you say as otherwise it was nonsense. I was also going to make the point that earnings were in effect profit for this group, but didn't because some smart alec might come along and point out some differences.
If it is as you say then I agree it was a pointless point to make re £200K earners. Why bother to mention those on £200K? The issue is the cutoff of £50K which seems reasonable to me and is the only relevant number. Just confuses matters. From that logic you could say we are setting the limit at £1 because someone earns £1,000,000. It wasn't worth wasting his breath and if that was what he was saying it certainly confused me.
Didn't know about your last point. I haven't actually looked into this in details. Any comments on my other 2 points? Two groups that as far as I can see have been missed. I would like to see help spread wider so it is fairer, but less generously.
@isam “if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic.” Flu is deadly when it induces pneumonia. I would like to know whether the lungs are distressed in the same way with SARS-CoV. It seems to me that the enormous need for ventilators shows it to be more lethal than normal flu in the end stages of illness.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
Quite - the 1601 Poor Laws were enacted by government - the essence of collective action.
The OAPension was introduced by the Liberal Govt of 1905-10. Following, IIRC, the policy of the German Govt under Bismarck.
True - 300 years after the first government action on poverty - with various measures in the 19c prompted by the poverty at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the basis of all systems linked to the thinker Jeremy Bentham
'Less eligibility was a British government policy passed into law in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It stated that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside so that there was a deterrence to claiming poor relief'.
Of course it sounds harsh to us in the 21st century worded in that way - but versions pervade all social welfare systems pretty much everywhere. Is the only way to ensure consent.
It doesn't sound harsh. It's pretty obvious. Slanted more positively, it's the 'more eligibility principle' - the principle that we must make working (for those who can) more eligible than not working.
We don't really do that - and haven't for a long time. Hence the long term not seeking work group.
A UBI is simpler than pretending we would leave people to starve. Which we won't.
Tax credits and the minimum wage are examples of the 'more eligibility' principle at work.
A UBI is about accepting that we will not let people starve, no matter what, Ensuring that all work makes you better off is part of that - eliminating the poverty trap(s)
You have just described universal credit.
Except that a UBI is far, far simpler to administer, eliminates any waiting time and is immune to benefit fraud.
it isn't immune to eligibility fraud though.
How so? Everyone is eligible.
Citizens of another country arent.
It's not exactly hard to determine who is a citizen of the UK. Or eligibility could simply be dependent on possession of an NI number. In any case, such issues are minimal compared to the labyrinthine complexities of universal credit.
a) Nothing on DC pensions where people have these in a drawdown, which is the norm these days outside of the public sector. If your pot is slashed and you are currently taking a pension, it won't matter if markets recover if you have had to take a disproportion amount out now to maintain your income. I can't see any solution to this. Even if the Govt makes payment to these pensioners so they don't have to take money now, how long can they do that for? For employees and self employed it will last until this is over. For DC pensioners it might last years after (hopefully not).
b) Anything for single person limited companies? I notice comments yesterday about them being tax avoiders on here. For most this is not true. Some are forced into contracting by their clients (in reality IR35 cases). Most aren't contractors but running proper businesses (as I used to). At any one time I had around 150 customers. I was legally an employee, although in practice self employed and I ploughed the profits back into the business. I would have therefore failed to qualify under either arrangement. As it happens I am now retired and probably wouldn't have qualified for other reasons and wouldn't have wanted to; but for others?
c) What the hell was Alok Sharma talking about on the TV this morning stating that average self employed person with profits of £50K has earnings of £200K. Sounds like he doesn't know what profits and earnings are or lives in cloud cuckooland. As it happens I don't disagree with the £50K limit and actually think the bailout for employees and self employed at 80% is actually too generous, but he gives the impression of not having a clue.
On (a), the government might permit as a short term crisis measure something that is commercially available to me on my non-pension investments. My manager allows me, if I so wish, to borrow against the value of my investments at under 2%pa APR. I don't need to, but if I were needing to draw down right now, I'd prefer to do that than cash in investments. In the current exceptional circumstances, the government might for a limited period permit borrowings up to say 25% of the value of the pension pot for those who formed the same view as me. This would be free for the government (maybe even good for public finances if it kept people from drawing state benefits later) and potentially popular.
That is imaginative.
So for instance the Govt could offer say an interest free loan secured against the pension pot for however it took the pot to recover for up to what the person normally draws down up to a maximum amount. That would be very cheap and could be run for sometime after the immediate crisis is over.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
A to-do list is very different from the overwhelming social pressure, and the upending of social hierarchy that a world war brings, however. Prewar benefits were uneven, to say the least, and at a broadly subsistence level. My grandfather wrote a book on industrial injuries in the early 1940's, and he considered the background health and poverty levels of many of the cases he saw even before their injuries to be generally catastrophic.
If he can point to one country in the world which was able to be fully prepared for this I'll eat my hat. The fact is that we, just like everwhere else are taking extreme measures to maintain and protect our health systems at massive cost to personal freedom and the economy. Nowhere can operate at this level in normal times - twould be like putting snowploughs on every street corner every year in case we get more than 2cms of snow! The man is a complete tool who has done huge damage to the UK political system by failing to provide an effective opposition and to the moral fibre of the UK by his tolerance of institutional racism anong his supporters.
Didn't know about your last point. I haven't actually looked into this in details. Any comments on my other 2 points? Two groups that as far as I can see have been missed. I would like to see help spread wider so it is fairer, but less generously.
I agree with your other two points, they were well made.
Didn't know about your last point. I haven't actually looked into this in details. Any comments on my other 2 points? Two groups that as far as I can see have been missed. I would like to see help spread wider so it is fairer, but less generously.
I agree with your other two points, they were well made.
Didn't know about your last point. I haven't actually looked into this in details. Any comments on my other 2 points? Two groups that as far as I can see have been missed. I would like to see help spread wider so it is fairer, but less generously.
I agree with your other two points, they were well made.
What I think we are seeing in response to this virus is a change in the collective mindset towards, well, collectivism. We are (nearly) all much more conscious that we are affected by the behaviour of others and likewise them with us. We are more willing to recognise that, for example, people should not be penalised for doing the right thing and that society collectively needs to bail them out. We are (or at least I am) more aware of how many vulnerable people there are in our society and how important it is to help them.
Will we ever go back to people waiting weeks for their benefits and a vicious sanctions regime? Surely not.
If we can house the homeless now why the hell did we not do it years ago?
If the economy can sustain whateverittakes economics what were the arguments about relatively modest differences in public spending about?
After WW2 the country threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government who transformed our society, mainly for the good. I can see such a leftward swing happening again. I wonder if our ever flexible Boris and the clever Rishi just might be able to harness it as the Tory party reinvents itself once again.
Assuming the feeling lasts - a big if - there may be some changes. However, some social phenomena are not that simple. Some rough sleepers , eg, always prefer the streets to the alternatives. It seems to be just a quirk of human nature. Regarding the benefit system - it goes back at least as far as the 1600 Poor Laws remember and from day 1 there has always been a tension between desire to help those in poverty through no fault of their own and the idle and feckless. While over time the terminology has changed, in essence the tension remains. Those who work hard and save will always resent those who don't and game the system.
There was effectively no system to game before the collective experience of World War II.
That is quite wrong - the mythology of no health care before the NHS, for example. The NHS was conceived as a tidying & simplification of the existing tangle of (inadequate) health care provision.
The welfare state has very, very old roots.
I wasn't talking about the NHS specifically, but the haphazard patchwork of charity and poor relief that existed before the welfare state. There was no unified or national system at any significant level. My grandfather worked as a surgeon up to and during World War II, and was aghast at the general condition of some of the patient he took on effectively as charity cases.
Which was why it was on the todo list of the Chamberlin government.
Pensions and unemployment benefits were of a fair age at that point, incidentally.
The myth that 1945 invented collective action on such things doesn't stand much inspection.
A to-do list is very different from the overwhelming social pressure, and the upending of social hierarchy that a world war brings, however. Prewar benefits were uneven, to say the least, and at a broadly subsistence level. My grandfather wrote a book on industrial injuries in the early 1940's, and he considered the background health and poverty levels of many of the cases he saw even before their injuries to be generally catastrophic.
Yes - the point was that the, but for the war, a national heath system would have been introduced. Most probably something like the B option in the Beverage report.
The economy has been tanked largely to save the elderly. The elderly are going to have to accept that there must be a price to pay for that.
The end of the triple lock for sure. We are going to be at risk of inflation. It has to go.
The only link needed is to average earnings - including if negative.
This is what ensures that pensioners do not over time become impoverished relative to the rest of society.
Because contrary to what some believe, poverty IS relative. That this is so is why the earnings link is crucial and why when the triple lock goes - as it must and will - it is the earnings link and only the earnings link which should be retained.
Pensioners to rise and fall with the general tide.
It is also what was, from the 70s on, believed to be completely unaffordable. Because overtime earning regularly outstripped inflation. And why the restoration of the earnings link was resisted for so long.
The last Prime Minister to die in office was Viscount Palmerston in 1865, who was 80 years old at the time. Admittedly Campbell-Bannerman (died 15 days after resigning) and Winston Churchill (severe stroke) had narrow squeaks of it. (By contrast, in that same time six US presidents have died in office: Garfield, Arthur, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt and Kennedy.)
Given who would replace him, I am suddenly very anxious that Boris Johnson should not break this 155 year duck.
A tale is told of the great wit and anarchist John Wilkes, who was sitting next to the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, at a dinner in Paris. Suddenly, Wilkes stood up and proposed a toast to the health of His Majesty King George III. After the toast had been drunk, rather ungraciously on the part of the Prince, he turned to Wilkes and asked, 'tell me, how long have you taken an interest in my father's health?'
'Why, since I had the pleasure of Your Royal Highness' acquaintance,' came the reply.
Comments
Pressure must be put on China though to improve its sanitation in its meat markets and the safety of its labs.
I want a UBI to replace the tax free allowance - everyone gets it, all the time. Paid directly by the government. It would never be withdrawn or cut - for any reason.
Disability etc would be a separate system on top.
Any money you earn would be taxed - from the first pound. But it would always increase your income.
The point being nothing to do with Coronavirus, but that “if normal flu infections and deaths were reported in the way this virus has, we would live on a similar state of panic.”
"We're massively increasing the testing to see whether you have it now and ramping up daily testing from 5,000 a day, to 10,000 to 25,000 and then up at 250,000," - B Johnson
There are large swathes of the population who will hardly become 'poor' as a result of this, a bit poorer maybe but not poor.
Ironically, many of the genuine poor are likely to be just a little less poor for a few weeks due to this:
"...for a single Universal Credit claimant (aged 25 or over), the standard allowance will increase from £317.82 to £409.89 per month."
https://www.understandinguniversalcredit.gov.uk/coronavirus/
A proper UBI setup fixes this - you don't need to even tell the UBI delivery outfit that you have got a job or lost one. That's just a tax thing.
Sounds like it is available to everyone whether or not they have lost any earnings?
Surely not otherwise Sunak really is spaffing taxpayers money.
The young are far more likely to pull through if they need intensive care. If the NHS is overloaded to that degree, they won't get it.
About half of all those admitted to intensive care are age 20-64. These wouldn't have likely passed on that soon.
About an eighth are age 20-44. Not a huge number, but still quite frightening if left unchecked.
The large majority of that half aged 20-64 would pull through with help. If 500,000 came down with it in three months or so, they wouldn't get it.
It would be a higher death rate per month amongst those 20-64 year olds than any three months of WWII
https://twitter.com/SportsDirectUK/status/1243438000677302274
In any event, letting this virus run unchecked would have a far more serious economic impact than any caused by the government's actions.
I am not a Tory, anything but, but I'd give the government 7 or 8/10 for their handling of this to date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blott_on_the_Landscape_(TV_series)
Having said that, I'm not sure why the government thinks this point is terribly relevant to the discussion. It's a bit of spin to justify the £50K cut-off, but I'd have thought the cut-off would be perfectly reasonable whatever the tail of the distribution.
I agree that for some at least the package is very generous. The bit about it which hasn't received much attention is that the self-employed can get the 80% grant even if their income falls only modestly as a result of the crisis,
And that's lunch sorted.
If it is as you say then I agree it was a pointless point to make re £200K earners. Why bother to mention those on £200K? The issue is the cutoff of £50K which seems reasonable to me and is the only relevant number. Just confuses matters. From that logic you could say we are setting the limit at £1 because someone earns £1,000,000. It wasn't worth wasting his breath and if that was what he was saying it certainly confused me.
Didn't know about your last point. I haven't actually looked into this in details. Any comments on my other 2 points? Two groups that as far as I can see have been missed. I would like to see help spread wider so it is fairer, but less generously.
Flu is deadly when it induces pneumonia. I would like to know whether the lungs are distressed in the same way with SARS-CoV. It seems to me that the enormous need for ventilators shows it to be more lethal than normal flu in the end stages of illness.
So for instance the Govt could offer say an interest free loan secured against the pension pot for however it took the pot to recover for up to what the person normally draws down up to a maximum amount. That would be very cheap and could be run for sometime after the immediate crisis is over.
But not yet, I think:
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1243496858095411200
Given who would replace him, I am suddenly very anxious that Boris Johnson should not break this 155 year duck.
Adam Boulton even questioned why he had the test before NHS staff
Boulton.
He is the Prime Minister leading a fight against the most wicked virus taking lives and devastating the economy
You need to move on from your dislike of Boris
'Why, since I had the pleasure of Your Royal Highness' acquaintance,' came the reply.