2014 January 04 « Dr Alf's Blog

Twickenham United Kingdom (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Dr Alf asks about the proper trajectory for reform in the UK.

Given the past record since World War II, I think we need to consider why we are in decline, who has been responsible for the present “trajectory”, and whether the present institutions and systems are fit for purpose.

Given our size as a nation, our population, our poor levels of State education, the reduced levels of our armed forces, our stated ambitions, posturing and actions are those of a man with empty pockets standing outside a jewelers, trying to impress his fiancée and future in-laws, with the prospect of a diamond engagement ring, when all he can afford is a shabby suit with shiny elbows and a cubic zirconia ring.

We need to look at Singapore, Switzerland and possibly Germany, build ourselves a target operating model based on rapprochement, tax haven status and an Establishment that is there on merit rather than on an inherited basis.

We should stop trying to pretend that we are important, that we should be listened to, that we are a Great Power and concentrate on substance, exports, job creation, innovation and managing other people’s money.

Our coat needs to be cut according to our cloth and we need to increase the number of useful and productive citizens whilst reducing the number who are a problem and a burden and the costs of keeping them.

For that, we need strong law and order, no more immigration unless it is people with special skills, more personal responsibility, fewer and shorter holidays, greater productivity, no more meddling in the affairs of other countries where we have no business, and more straight talking to the public.

There should be no more overseas aid and there should be a relentless focus on those things which add value to the nation and increase prosperity for the bulk of the population and on getting rid of those institutions, practices, organisations and customs which detract from or destroy value.

Currently, we have too many of the latter and these need to be identified, rooted out and eliminated without sentiment, nostalgia or as much as a backwards glance.

This would require an objective test against which questions need to be asked and a “sunset law” applied with no keeping of anything just for the sake of tradition alone or some arcane view that says because”these things have stood us in good stead in the past they must be relevant now”.

John Gelmini

Dr Alf and the Guardian, (a newspaper I have to force myself to read sometimes), make interesting points.

At root, the way to solve the jobs crisis for the Millennials is to stop pretending that the world as we once knew it is still here or that the old orthodoxies still apply.

In the days when they did, people would be educated and if they were bright or connected they would go to university and then on to top jobs.

Those at the bottom would leave school and perhaps get an apprenticeship or internship and start work whilst a tiny minority would work for themselves.

As long as economies produced sufficient growth and the elderly retired and died at the appointed time (about 77 years), there was no problem and just enough jobs could be created to support the Millennials of that time.

When this didn’t happen, a conventional war would cause the economy to expand and large numbers of Millennials were killed off leaving the entire edifice in a state of rough and ready equilibrium.

Now we have a toxic mixture of too little growth, automation and too many old people living too long and creating burdens for the Millennial generation and those in middle age.

This has been exacerbated by the lack of wars to cull people in sufficiently large numbers, the Banking crisis in which trillions were stolen and taken offshore and too little investment in growth on the part of Governments, banks and major companies.

The entire structure needs to be rethought and refashioned anew:

1) We need to recognize that 50% of our Millennnials will never work in conventional employment, so we should prepare them for a life of entrepreneurship and create business boot camps with e-learning and simulation capabilities, plus intensive language and sales training in relevant languages using Pimsleur techniques to accelerate the process.

2) We need to recognize that the market for business and jobs is now global except for micro businesses like plumbing, specialist butchers, market trading, farmers markets and the like.

School leavers of average intelligence have to be ready to work anywhere, travel as necessary, sell and use different languages.

Our school system has to be able to rise to that challenge at state level

3) People will have to become responsible for their own health, physically, mentally and emotionally and not rely on doctors to make them well whilst doing nothing for themselves.

4) One income stream may well not be enough –People will have to learn to create multiple income streams and become self-sufficient

5) As technology advances, skills packages can be positioned in the Cloud and used via augmented reality in the form of Google Glasses until such time as skills can be inserted into a person’s brain using a “Matrix style jump program”

6) Countries will need to have swarming out arrangements with other countries, so that when they need people unavailable in their indigenous populations they can draw guest workers from elsewhere from a “Peoplebank” not dissimilar to the concept of a Timeshare spacebank.

This would be done on a planned basis with full transparency, unlike the situation which now exists with Romanians and Bulgarians coming to the UK where only the Government has any idea of the figures

7) Taxes will have to fall as a precursor to an amnesty and the bringing back onshore of monies concealed offshore ready for investment into job creating enterprises

8) A balance between automation, robotics and people actually doing work will have to be struck whereby the most menial and unpleasant tasks are automated and the rest are left to people who would work, pay taxes and gain personal satisfaction through doing worthwhile things.

The alternative if we are to have a large, free marketplace is to pay people to sit at home and do nothing other than consume what the robots,self replicating machines and 3D printers produce.

Without a large free market, we would need just 3 kinds of people: