Metal theft. The biters bit

[Ste]

On Feb 10, 3:13=A0pm, "'Mike'" >>have autonomy then you need to be trusted (rather than simply

Or get *several* jobs working from home, and bill the same eight hours a day to all of them!

[Ste]

I'm not sure that is a real advantage. Adults need time to recover from child-rearing, and it doesn't harm children to interact with, and have good relations with, more than one caring adult. The reality is that society needs to move forward by reducing the working week and giving people (men in particular) more flexible and family-friendly working hours.

I quite agree that children do need love and close attention from adults who have a long-term stake in the child's wellbeing. The whole point of a nursery is to achieve an efficiency of labour by spreading the attention of each adult across several children, but not only does that mean children get less attention and socialisation, but the little attention they do receive will be from adults who will have little time to build mutual relationships and who do not expect to see those children grow up - in other words, the children receive too little adult attention, and both adults and children experience too little continuity fo relationships.

It's also worth pointing out that it does not replicate the usual way in which large families are managed, which is that as the family grows older, the older children increasingly participate in child rearing and domestic labour, so that to a certain extent the effort that the parents put into the older children, trickles down to the younger children without additional effort on the parents' part, and obviously the nature of a family is such that there is a high degree of continuity.

I agree.

It is certainly nice to come in from work and have one's food ready cooked. I'm not sure it is an efficient use of labour, however, to have a woman and a cooker in each house to prepare food (which the man has to bankroll). I've said before that what our society really needs to look at, is providing high-quality restaurant/takeaway food at an affordable cost, so that the labour of cooking and shopping (which is particularly onerous for families with children) is reduced.

Indeed!

Quite, although this seems incongruous with your proposal that families do exactly that: survive on one salary.

Agreed, although I suppose it will not be unexpected if I point out that this is all perfectly consistent with what I said about there being sufficient economic capacity for all families to live on a single income. The only reason some families would struggle under the current circumstances, is because other rich families are consuming vast amounts of finite economic resources.

[Ste]

But to return to what I was just saying about child daycare, the whole point of elderly care homes is to wring out labour from the process of caring, freeing that labour up (women's labour, in particular) for consumption in the market economy - and also, to some extent, alleviating the psychological burden of care, so that other burdens created by the market economy can be successfully carried without mental breakdown.

Whereas society will suffer directly from the poor treatment of children, the only limit to how badly the elderly can be treated is younger people's own fear of being treated in that way at the end of their lives. There will probably be more demand for euthanasia in due course, but the certainty of suffering and premature death at the end of life, is only likely to make people more concerned with their immediate circumstances rather than planning for the future, which is adverse for the stability of any society, but also adverse for any ruling class which is trying to tell people "suffer now and you'll be rewarded later". People aren't going to peacefuly tolerate 20 years of austerity, if that 20 years represents the best years of their lives, after which they will be on the slab.

But it is the question of which came first. The need for care homes, arose once women were expected to pursue life outside of domestic labour, and also as the demands of socialising middle class children have increased. For a family that is already at the redline with two employed earners, two children, and a big mortgage, it is laughable to expect them to suddenly unwind that lifestyle when granny unforseeably takes a bad turn.

The reality is that the state is simply straining to compensate for the problems being created by the free markets, and as the markets increasingly force people into unhappy and unnatural modes of living and constantly encourages parasitic competition in every aspect of life, so too the state spends increasing sums of money compensating for it where otherwise the threads by which society is hanging would otherwise snap.

Given the existing demands of the economy, sending women back to the kitchen would cause a massive undersupply of labour, and a spike in workers' wages at the expense of profit. The same is true of immigration. And if the state returned to the post-war policies of full employment, which would reduce the unemployment benefit bill, that would cause a spike in workers' wages and a return of a muscular working class who are not amenable to the interests of private profit.

That would certainly ease the tax burden on the rich. I'm not sure it would necessarily yield higher-quality care for the elderly, or benefits for the economy with so many workers being taken out of employment at short notice by the need to provide care. Nor ideologically would it help the rich, to start promoting the idea that people stand or fall as a collective family, rather than as individuals.

Indeed, but so too those family members are also less likely to sanction criminal behaviour amongst those unemployed family members, if that reduces the financial strain on the family.

And this also subtly presupposes the existence of the imaginary class of people who are simply too lazy to work - I know only one person with even remotely that kind of attitude, and he has emotional problems such that he could probably never turn a profit for an employer in a competitive market, and his attitude of 'I should not have to work' is probably a defensive position rather than an honest preference, and indeed his family and partners (as well as the taxpayer) have subsidised him to a great extent all of his life, but the only realistic alternative would be for the state to give him supported work of a kind which it was willing to accept an overall economic loss on each unit of labour rendered!

The remainder of those I know who are unemployed, are effectively unemployable in the current market conditions, and none of them are averse to work per se - one of them (who is in his late 30s and has been unemployed most of his life and has mental health problems - probably as a result of his circumstances) was almost harassing me for work last year or so, whilst I had to maintain that I had no work to offer (and that I wasn't running a business anymore).

Even if I had had work to offer, I can't see what use he could possibly have been to me, having never had any reason (or economic means) to develop skills, or any opprortunity to develop economically useful skills en passant through the ordinary course life. Even in terms of crude manual labour, decades of being on the dole had not left him with the physical or mental stamina of a navvy, and the poor rates of pay offered by the market would hardly have been much incentive or reward to him anyway.

[Cynic]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:42:50 -0800 (PST), Ste wrote:

You may recall that I stated that a return to the traditional one-worker family is IMO highly *desirable*, but I then lamented that unfortunately present economics will not allow that to take place for many/most families.

Whilst physical resources are necessarily finite, economic resources are an artificial construct. We presently have a situation in which there are sufficient of many resources (especially all the essentials) to supply everyone with as much as they would take if the resource was completely free. The very rich do not consume more food, for example, than the poor in this country - and IME the quality is not significantly different either (even though the rich person may pay more for better presentation, preparation or packaging). You will find that physical comfort in the homes of the vast majority of people in the UK is equal to the physical comfort in the homes of the very wealthy in terms of temperature, air quality, the comfort of beds & furniture etc. Whilst the wealthy may have larger homes, the average person does not feel particularly short of room in their home. Whilst the wealthy may have leisure and luxury facillities in their own home, those same facillities are available and affordable to most people as public facillities, and the real increase that having such facillities in the home afford to a person's standard of living is largely one of perception than reality. In fact in many cases people *prefer* to indulge in such activities in a public place than in their own home because of the increased social interaction of the former. I have a fridge containing drinks, tables and chairs in my house, for example, but I still visit pubs on occassion even though the same activity in my own home would, if anything, be more comfortable.

Having experienced both camps, it is my belief that in fact there is a relatively small difference between the actual quality of life of the rich and the actual quality of life of the average person in the UK. A person sipping a £15 cocktail at the poolside of a £1000 per night hotel on an exotic tropical island is not gaining significantly more pleasure from that activity than someone drinking a Barcardi Breezer at the side of a hotel pool in Spain or Portugal - which is an activity that the majority of the UK population is able to afford to do at least once a year. And having dined fairly often at places where meal prices are in the 3 figure bracket per person, I can say that if anything I enjoy a £10 meal at Weatherspoons just as much if not more. And I can completely honestly state that I get no more pleasure or satisfaction from washing my hands in a marble sink with gold taps than I do in the typical batroom of an average home.

Probably the biggest difference wrt quality of life is the ability of the wealthy to employ servants to carry out the boring chores that most people have to put up with - though again, having been in such a position myself, there are plenty of downsides to having servants that are not necessarily compensated for by losing the need to clean the floors or do the washing-up. And these days many onerous tasks are made a lot easier with affordable machines - heck, choose your clothes wisely and you don't even have to use an iron all that often.

[Cynic]

It is not the "market economy" that is soaking up people's wages to make it unaffordable to live on a single income. It is government taxation. And a great deal of that taxation is used to provide the expensive services and benefits that would not be necessary if a family could afford to live on a single income!

Consider how much of your income ends up going to the government one way or another. Obviously there is income tax, VAT and council tax, which of themselves eat up a huge percentage of your income (work it out and surprise yourself). But you also pay indirectly for business taxes because the cost of *all* goods, utilities and services must incororate that levy - which in many cases you are then charged VAT on. And of course there is the huge cut that government takes from motor fuels that again affects the cost of almost everything.

If people could afford to go back to single-income families, it would increase the number of jobs available which consequently would decrease the amount needed to pay unemployment benefits.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 13:23:18 on Mon, 13 Feb

2012, Cynic remarked:

The societal sea change in the last generation has been exactly that - homes becoming more comfortable than pubs, rather than vice versa. Although some pubs try quite hard to keep their comforts ahead of the game, that's often at the expense (no pun intended) of pricing themselves out of the market.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Acute point and well made.

My home is now far more comfortable and nicer to be in than almost all pubs.

I can smoke if I want, drink as much as I like, the toilet are not disgusting, and mostly the food is as good or better.

If I want to gossip, there is the Internet.

If I want to watch a football cricket or Rugby match, there is the TV or the Internet/computer.

What do I need or want a PUB for?

[djc]

I think the biggest difference is the freedom from stress that comes when not everything is a necessity. ie not being desperate to find a job or worrying how to pay an unexpectedly high bill. But even those things are relative: become accustomed to a certain standard of living and rate of spending and adjustment to unexpected reduced circumstances can be difficult whatever your position on an absolute scale of wealth. Living up to your income is always unwise, but for the really poor they is no margin to do otherwise..

[Ste]

You also said that the problem was one of "expectations", asserting your belief that the nanny state had caused or enabled this shift to "irresponsibility", and then went on to say that you think it would be beneficial to make close relatives strictly liable for the care of family members. I hardly think people can be blamed for a state of affairs where, by your own assertion, they cannot afford to be "responsible".

It is easy to talk of what they have in common. Less easy, but actually more interesting and relevant, to talk of what they do not have in common.

If they have a home - and aren't paying an arm and a leg for it.

Having facilities in one's home typically means more ability to partake at the convenience of your own moods, and without spending an inordinate amount of the day travelling elsewhere.

Presupposing that you want such social interaction - either in general, or at that instant. Quite regularly, I find myself wanting to be left alone so that I can dedicate and maintain my mental resources on some other important task, without having either undesirable interruption from those in proximity, and without having to maintain social nicety with those I might encounter.

Anyway, the point is that the rich can choose whether they want social interaction or not - the poor it seems must accept interaction whether they want it or not.

Quite, but that for you is a matter of choice. You can choose what you want to do.

There is a certain point at which extra money does not buy extra quality of life, I agree. Personally the most valuable thing to me is

*time* - and perhaps mental energy. It is these things that I too often find I do not have enough of - indeed, the point about mental energy is probably why I routinely find myself infuriated by the workings of the free market which levy a constant high tax on this, leaving less remaining for those things in life that are actually interesting and productive.

Anyway, the point is that for those who cannot afford a foreign holiday at all, while others can, that causes a disconnect in common experience and culture. If there is no culturally accepted alternative to a holiday, then that is likely to cause a degree of both boredom and stress directly, and its likely to cause a loss of closeness with friends.

Shared interests and experience are central to human relationships - I'm again touching on the point about continuity in human relationships, and how lacking this often is in today's society.

I'm not too bothered whether the sink is marble or ceramic. However, I do prefer to wash my hands in bathrooms that are clean and aesthetically pleasing, and I've been in plenty of bathrooms in poor households that are neither, and at the end of the day the only remedy usually is to spend money on improving the fittings (money that such people do not have). Generally, old fittings are both harder to clean (making people less like to clean them, other things being equal), and harder to make look clean.

Indeed, labour-saving appliances are the key to eliminating boring chores today. Though frankly, I find that just having a sink that is big enough to fully submerge all items being cleaned (a grill pan particularly), and store them on the draining board without careful (i.e. mentally demanding) stacking, often makes the operation seem so much easier - but again, it means having a sufficiently large kitchen, and the money to buy a big sink, and the spare mental resources to analyse that particular problem as I have done, and the power (either as owner or secure tenant) to fit such a sink and get enough use out of it to make it worth the investment.

[Ste]

My other reply went off on a different tack, but I've just realised what you were responding to. I didn't say the market economy was soaking up people's wages. I said it's soaking up their *labour power*. In other words, women's labour is increasingly sold on the market, rather than bartered domestically.

[Cynic]

Exactly my point - the average home is just about as comfortable as it is possible to get, and that aspect would not improve significantly if you won the lottery. You go to a pub for the *social* aspect, not the comfort, and the use of many *public* facilities is thus preferable to having such facilities in your own home.

[Cynic]

Purely for the social experience of physically being amongst a crowd of people, even if you are not actually interacting with many of them. Human psychology is such that for most people it is at times preferable to be surrounded by many strangers than being alone or in a smaller group of people.

I have visited several small uninhabited islands that had beautiful sandy beaches that were completely deserted. After the novelty of being in such places had worn off, I found that I much preferred being on a beach that has plenty of people on it (so long as it is not overcrowded).

[The Natural Philosopher]

BTDTGTTS.

No thanks

Says everything about you...

My nearest neighbour is 200 meters away and that's 200 meters too close.

>

[Cynic]

Only in the case of supporting a fairly severely disabled relative would one person need to stay at home. If the person needed support simply because they were unemployed, there is no reason why anyone would have to give up their job. The additional expense in supporting such a family member is little more than the cost of food for that person.

in addition, the premise is that were such a scheme adopted, the state would save money and would lower taxes, thus giving every working family more disposable income - hopefully sufficient to allow one partner to be able to give up employment.

What do you need that you do not have?

There are very few people above the age of 25 in the UK who do not have their own home (rented or mortgaged). The cost of that home has nothing to do with how comfortable it is.

Sure, wealth has advantages and gives you convenience and flexibility. But that additional flexibility and convenience provides only a minor increase in a person's quality of life - and my point is not that a wealthy person does not have a better quality of life than the average non-wealthy person, but that the difference is not nealy as great as the perception.

Sure - and I suspect that you have a home where you can do exactly that in just as much comfort as Bill Gates can in his home. In many cases a wealthy person has *less* privacy than the average person, because they will have various non-family members in the house most of the day.

That divide is in fact probably more on the side of the average person than most wealthy people. I would go so far as to say that the average person is socially more secure than a wealthy person, because theiy can be reasonably sure that their friends and lovers are with them because they enjoy their company rather than because they want to enjoy their money.

It is a matter of choice for the vast majority of average working people in the UK. Again, it is the very wealthy who are often trapped into a situation where they cannot indulge in such things, because wealth brings with it quite a bit of undesirable baggage.

Extreme wealth would in that case probably be very frustrating for you unless you refrained from using it (in which case why would you want it?) You will find that a great deal of time is taken up *managing* all the various things that your wealth has brought to you. You can mitigate that to an extent by hiring people to manage your money and assets - but even then you will be required to make a myriad decisions every week - and also spend time ensuring that your managers are doing their job satisfactorily and that nobody is taking advantage of you (which they certainly will if it becomes known that you are not keeping an eye on all your affairs).

Almost everyone in the UK has been capable of achieving sufficient income to afford a foreign holiday once a year for some considerable time. Albeit that the present economic downturn might have seen a temporary blip in that situation for a significant number of people.

I believe that the level to which our social welfare state has risen has played a very large part in causing the decline in social interaction within the larger community.

Oh come off it! Given that poor households are the ones most likely to have unemployed adults living in them, the only reason for dirty bathrooms is that the person is too lazy to clean. Perhaps you should consider the probability that it is the person's laziness that is responsible for both the dirty bathroom *and* their poverty rather than trying to argue that economic inequality makes a person incapable of picking up a cloth and applying a bit of elbow-grease.

And I can assure you that expensive ornate fittings are often far more difficult to clean than an ordinary chromed bath tap, and that even people living on benefits can get sufficient money to make basic improvements and decorations to their home - in poorer households the council will even do that for them completely free of charge.

I've been to the homes of people who are earning enough to spend on a restaurant meal once a week and a foreign holiday twice a year, but are living in a filthy pig sty. Conversely I have visited OAPs who are struggling to get by on a state pension, but who have spotless tidy houses. Cleanliness in the UK has very little connection with wealth.

But honestly - just how much would the quality of your life improve if you had a big sink? I find that with most limitations, I only have to figure out a solution once, and then make trivial changes to my work-habits to accomodate it with little or no disadvatage. And if such a change would, for you, make a significant improvement to the quality of your life, I have little doubt that you would find a way to get yourself a bigger sink (or a smaller grill pan!)

[Cynic]

I don't see how you can blame the "market economy" for that. IIUC it all began when the *government* persuaded women to go out to work in order to replace the male labour force that the government had just removed from the labour market in order to fight its war.

Prior to that, the labour market was perfectly happy to use a predominately male labour force, and women were happy to stay at home. The market was *forced* to adapt to an increasingly female workforce after the government removed a sizable chunk of the men - the jobs obviously had to be filled or they would not get done. So when the war ended and the men were once again available, they returned to find a labour market that was pretty full and consequently soon became completely saturated. Added to which the market was itself shrinking thanks to a combination of increasing automation and the cessation of military based manufacturing.

[Ste]

I wasn't "blaming" the market economy for bringing women into the workforce, and I'm not saying they should be forced back out of the workforce. What I am saying is that the labour market has adapted to, and benefitted from (i.e. the rich have disproportionately benefitted from), a supply of female labour. If you reverse the situation, there will be a transfer of wealth and power from women to men, and from rich to poor, so broadly speaking rich women stand to lose most, whilst poor men stand to gain most.

The rebuilding of the country provided a reasonable amount of work to be done, whilst an increasingly fairer distribution of economic production provided an increasingly higher living standard for the average worker. Many ordinary people lived better during and after the war, than they had done before it! I'm not aware of any labour surplus immediately following WW2.

[Ste]

Perhaps I was confused (and I'm not inclined to go back and check), but I thought you were advocating full liability for "care", not just financial liability for the unemployed. How exactly would your proposal work where most or all family members are out of work?

Lol. Do you really think that the savings would be so manifest?

What I need depends largely on what other people have.

I suspect the taxpayer will actually be paying, in part or whole, for quite a few of those.

Of course it does. If homes are costly, then by and large poorer people will be in smaller homes than would otherwise be suitable. And so too, unless you own your home outright, then it can be difficult to make that home particularly comfortable, without the risk of forfeiting the cost of any improvements.

It seems to me Cynic that if wealth provides so few advantages for the wealthy which are of minor benefit only, then why on Earth are they so keen to retain those advantages, and so keen to maintain disadvantage for others?

I'm sure I had this one with Ricardo I think the other week, where for all his claimed view on wealth and poverty, his political prescriptions and personal behaviour suggested quite the opposite view to the one claimed.

It really depends on what perception we're talking about, since we seem to be talking about the perceptions of unidentified third parties rather than our own.

I would certainly assert that, between more equal and more unequal

*societies as a whole*, the differences in quality of life are quite significant, although I am quite content to concede to you that inequality erodes the QoL of the rich as well as the poor - but it erodes the QoL of the poor moreso, and so in any given society, it is always better to be rich.

I do, but I am reasonably satisfied with the standard of comfort in my own home, and generally speaking I have the money to rectify any deficit.

I'm not sure that is necessarily the case, nor does it necessarily follow that the presence of such people is unwanted.

Yes you may well be correct, but once again, the rich have the

*unilateral choice* to give up their money, if it becomes an inordinate burden. The poor do not have the unilateral choice to become rich. Once again, it seems to me that you're in danger of arguing in support of redistribution, when it does not seem to be your general intention to do so.

Indeed, most people can still choose to go the pub, but I'm making a more general point there are lots of basic choices that are increasingly enjoyed only in proportion to one's wealth.

Why don't they give it up then? That is the question that your line of argument seems to raise.

I *don't* want extreme wealth. And it is not that I begrudge material goods to others who do want them - the point is that economic wealth is a source of power, and what I do not want is for that excess power to be used against my interests, and the powerful almost invariably do use power against the powerless.

I find it quite funny how you can refer to the wealthy fearing being "taken advantage of", when taking advantage is what most of the wealthiest are doing.

The point about holidays is that one has the power to afford them *in addition to* other normal cultural activies, not instead of them. I'm not sure that "almost everyone" can - and indeed, where the vast majority can afford something, the deprivation becomes even more harsh on the minority who cannot, because there are less likely to be socially acceptable alternatives where only a minority cannot afford to participate in the mainstream activity.

I would say so, although I'm not so sure that it's going to be that temporary.

No, it is the level to which market forces and inequality have risen, that have played the largest part in causing that decline.

I didn't say the unemployed lacked the time to clean them. I said that they were *harder* to clean, and harder to make *look* clean. In other words, you will put more effort into cleaning older fittings, and they will look comparatively dirtier even after having put that effort in - I've seen plenty of bathrooms that look worse when clean, than mine does when moderately dirty, and I can only assume that the vast majority of people (including those who are forced to accept old fittings) make a similar assessment as I do of bathroom quality.

And whilst you may assume that the unemployed poor by virtue of their lifestyle have plenty of effort and willpower to spare, the reality is likely to be quite the opposite, that increased financial stress, increased consequential demands on physical and psychological effort across the board with everyday activies, and fewer pleasant everyday experiences, are likely to leave them sorely depleted of willingness to exert effort.

I know when I feel stressed, even if I otherwise have a surfeit of time, I find myself *less* inclined to do unpleasant tasks or difficult chores, not moreso. I have no reason to think other people generally behave any differently - nobody I have ever known, has ever said to me "cor, I feel extremely tired and stressed at the moment, I think I'll go and do a few hours of unpleasant work". More often, they either say that they do not want to do anything at all, or else they say they want to engage in activities that they find recreational - and indeed that is exactly how I think too.

I don't observe that. This seems to be an instance of how all this imaginary work abounds in the economy, and how, since the recession, a million people suddenly got lazier (for reasons that are never made entirely apparent by the people who offer this line of reasoning).

Of course, I did not say anything so simplistic.

I accept that, but garishly ornate fittings are increasingly less popular these days - especially in working households where money is available but time is at a premium.

Personally, I was recently looking at commercial-quality hands-free taps for my bathroom sink (so as to completely do away with moving parts and intricate details where muck tends to accumulate and which are particularly difficult to clean), and next time I'm tempted to have the tap and pipework wall-mounted instead of sink-mounted - so that you do not get the unpleasant accumulation of water and scale around the base of the taps, and wiping the sink clean can be done in pretty much one swoop of the hand.

I know several people who have struggled to get repairs done by private landlords. Even so, it is one thing to throw up some wallpaper or lash on some cheap paint, another to fit a high-quality kitchen to a property in which you have no real security of tenure.

I certainly agree there is no perfect correlation - some people will always be content with dirt, and others will always try to polish mud floors, meanwhile the standards of the vast majority of people are sensitive to the physical and mental effort required to maintain those standards. It wasn't all about cleanliness anyway - I also mentioned aesthetic (and unfortunately no amount of cleaning makes a worn green or brown bathroom suite look acceptable), and I don't know about you but I really do prefer to use modern, quality bathrooms.

If I was using the sink several times a day for cooker fittings, or draining a high number of items on the draining board, it would make a significant difference I think to have a sink area that was of a commensurate size.

I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

[Cynic]

My proposal was that the state would only give aid (of any sort) to people who *don't* have any relatives capable of supporting them, and that people become obliged by law to provide support for family members. Obviously it would need a fair number of details sorting out, but that was the bare bones of the proposal. Basically it extends the responsibility that we have for the wellbeing of our minor children to a larger family circle.

It would only happen if a substantial tax decrease was specifically made part of the new proposal - which it would have to be in order to stand any chance of being accepted by the voters.

That is true, but does not answer my question. What, right now, do rich people have that you do not have that causes you to feel that your general quality of life is significantly worse than theirs?

And? We are talking about the relative quality of life between rich and poor, so the question of who pays for what is irrelevant. In the case of wealthy businessmen, their customers are no doubt paying for their home - and if their main customer is the government, that means that the taxpayer is effectively paying for their home as well. So what?

The comfort of a home does not improve significantly with its size, so long as it is big enough not to be overcrowded. My degree of comfort whilst watching TV, lying in bed or sat at my computer is unconnected with how many rooms the house has or how big its garden is. Comfort largely consists of having comfortable furniture and a comfortable temperature in the home. I also see no problem with buying and doing things that will improve my everyday comfort and convenience in a rented property (and have frequently done so) - and it is often possible to make all necessary improvements in a way that does *not* mean they are forfeit if and when you move. It seems stupid to me to put up with discomfort just because making an improvement might end up benefitting the landlord. The only question for me is whether the increase to my comfort or convenience is worth the money and/or effort. You might also consider that even if you own your own house, very little of the money you spend on it will end up increasing the selling price significantly, so that money is equally forfeit when you move out. In fact, a homeowner must spend quite a lot just to

*maintain* the value of the house, and that expense is something that a person renting a property does not incur, so it's very much swings and roundabouts.

I have not come across any wealthy people who are "keen to maintain a disadvantage to others". Many (but not all) people are indeed keen to become wealthy themselves - mainly due to the *perceived* advantages. If they achieve that goal, they often find that the reality of the situation is not nearly as great as they imagined (although there are obviously some real advantages), and in many, many cases the wealth brings far more disadvantages. Achieving "fame and fortune" has ended up killing quite a few people at a young age by one means or another.

I think your own perception affords wealth rather more advantages than the reality. I have experienced both poverty and moderate wealth, and whilst I can certainly state that I prefer wealth to poverty, it is also true that my happiness and quality of life have not been associated in any way with my bank balance. Indeed, the most content and happiest period of my life so far was during a period when I didn't even have a bank account.

Again, apart from *extreme* poverty and *extreme* wealth, the difference in QoL is, I mainatain, more a product of your perception than reality.

Does that mean that you regard yourself as a member of the "rich" class? In the UK, the vast majority of people have the ability to rectify any significant deficit to their comfort.

Of course it is not *necessarily* the case, but people who live in large homes *need* to employ staff for everyday cleaning and maintainance, for example. The presence is obviously not unwanted in one sense (they were hired to do a job), but you do not have privacy whilst they are in your house. You probably wouldn't(for example) pop to the kitchen dressed only in underclothes or less when there is the probability of passing a cleaning lady on the way.

To say that a wealthy person could simply get rid of their money if they don't like the disadvantages it brings is as simplistic as arguing that a fat person could simply stop eating so much if they don't like being overweight, or that a poor person could simply get a job if they don't like being poor. Yes, it is possible, but it is far from easy.

People born into wealth are also born into a culture that is different to the culture of average or poor people, and so getting rid of money would entail a change of the person's cultural identity.

Wealth also carries quite a few responsibilities. A typical wealthy person will be supporting several families by employing members of those families, and will also have formed various social attachments that would not (for very real social reasons) be possible without having money. Therfore giving up wealth will mean breaking off strong social attachments as well as harming a few other people.

Whilst a person who aquires wealth suddenly - such as in an inheritance or lottery win would *at that time* be perfectly able to give the money away, almost all people will at that stage perceive it as being of great benefit to them - and by the time they discover that money also has downsides they will have formed the abovementioned bonds.

Also, in our culture money=success and poverty=failure, and so there is the person's self-esteem at stake as well. added to which many wealthy people have become obsessed with making money to the point of addiction, and consequently devote all their time to the task - which ends up destroying their family and social life and means that they do not actually take the time to relax and *enjoy* the extensive fruits of their labours.

We are discussing the situation in the UK. I am therefore not considering people who are so poor that they have to sleep on the streets and cannot afford to eat. I am also not including the very top extremes of wealth, such as people who can afford to buy a tropical island and set up their own society and live completely apart from the rest of the World.

See above. On balance most people will find being wealthy preferable to being economically average, and I do not pretend otherwise. my point is only tyhat the difference is a heck of a lot less than most people's perception, and there are downsides involved that most people either do not consider at all, or do not appreciate how much of a downside it will end up being.

Very few wealthy individuals exert power over the general population to any extent whatsoever. If power is what you fear, then direct your attack toward governments that have far more power, and moreover wield it routinely against the general population.

You are very much mistaken if you believe that it is all a one-way street. The more you have (or are perceived to have), the more people there will be trying to take it from you. There will also be people trying to deliberately harm you because of jealousy. If you owned a car worth over £100K, you would soon learn to be very fearful of parking it in the average public place because of the very high probability that it would suffer malicious vandalism.

As said, it is not all that helpful to discuss the small minority of people at the extreme ends of the financial spectrum - they are special cases that require special treatment. From what I have experienced in the UK, even the average unemployed council estate citizen has managed to find the means to get to Spain for a week or so each year without impacting their ability to have a pint at the pub a couple of times a week for the rest of the year. It is more likely to be the businessman who cannot spare the time from his business to take a decent holiday.

We may indeed be at the start of a general lower standard of living ratherr than a temporary hiccough. Which means a depression. If inflation and our present high taxation continues into a depression era, we will end up with riots and civil unrest that will force a radical change. The government will have to re-learn that the population must be given their bread and circuses - and both commodities consist of far more than they once used to.

We will have to agree to disagree on that point. For me, the fact that the government is taking my hard-earned money and giving it to the 17 year old single mother next door gives me far more reason to decide she doesn't need any further help from myself than the fact that the CEO of Tesco is earning a 7 figure income. YMMV.

Most rooms can be made to look nice if the effort is made without needing to spend any significant amount of money.

I see. Which is a long-winded way of saying that they are lazy.

There are plenty of things that I feel "disinclined" to do, but nevertheless I still do them. Its how people who are *not* lazy behave.

So you go and watch the TV and leave the dirty dishes stacked in the sink for yet another day. I know. It's called "laziness".

Laziness might not be the reason they are out of work, but it *is* the reason that they have a dirty bathroom - and if the bathroom indicates that they are lazy then laziness *might* be the reason for the lack of a job as well.

I did not state that they were prevalent in such places - I was refuting the statement that cheap fittings are more difficult to clean than expensive fittings.

If you would really like such taps but cannot reasonably save the money to buy them from a showroom, there are several places where you could try to find perfectly good second-hand products. Then borrow some tools and fit them yourself.

A kitchen is either fit for purpose or it is not. If not, the landlord has a duty to fix it. It would appear that you have fallen victim to the sort of marketing that you claim to abhor. There is no reason whatsoever why a traditional kitchen should be more difficult to work in than a modern "fitted" kitchen (which seem to be comprised of overpriced and badly made glitzy chipboard and plastic units that damage easily).

What, exactly did you have in mind when speaking of a "high quality" kitchen? The kitchen appliances are quite correctly the tenant's responsibility - and remain the tenant's property.

TBH the appearance of a functional room such as a bathroom is of very little concern whatsoever, though a pleasant appearance is better than a shoddy appearance. It is its functionality that affects the quality of life however, and just about every bathroom in the UK has similar functionality. If the difference was between having a hot shower available and having a galvanised cold water bath in the living room rather I would agree that it is a difference that would affect quality of life. While I very much prefer the bathroom in the house I am currently renting (which is big enough to hold a dance) to the house I was renting last year (which was small and cramped), it is not something that I could say affects my quality of life to any extent. A shower takes just as long and gets me just as clean in both, and I can't say that using the toilet is a noticeably different experience.

There are plenty of ways to make a shabby room look better that does not involve spending a great deal of money. Just take a wander around your local pound shops and charity shops to get lots of ideas of things that can be put on walls and floors to cover up wear and tear and make the room look brighter.

So *if* you were doing those things I would expect you to find a practical solution. I doubt it would take mne a great deal of thought to come up with an idea if I were actually in such a position.

My point is that the things that *do* make a significant difference to your quality of life are capable of being fixed by even poor people, with only a moderate amount of thought and effort.

[Ste]

So I interpreted your position correctly the first time around! I think it is absurd from any reasonable political perspective - quite out of kilter with your usual standard of reasoning.

Even that responsibility does not exist in practice, except at the will of the parents (by which I mean their choice to continue caring for a child they have already delivered, as well as their choice over whether to conceive a child at all).

As I've said to you before Cynic, all this combination of proposals does is erode the redistributive mechanisms in society. As with the poll tax, lots of people supported it, until they suddenly saw how much they were personally going to pay, once the inequality in the initial market distribution of incomes was left completely unfettered by redistributive taxation.

I'm not currently in dire want of anything that the rich have. Most of the things that I do want and which would benefit me, such as bridling or abolition of the market mechanism, would benefit the rich also to a degree (but also incidentally harm them by the erosion of the benefits they derive from the market generally). That is, from a purely personal point of view, it's not that I want something from them that they have - it's that I want something for everybody including myself, that will incidentally involve the rich becoming poorer.

Take the example of theft crimes. When I was in Cyprus, I left a water pump and several tools out in the street (bit of a long story). When I came back from the pub later, nothing had moved, and I was quite surprised to find that they had not been taken - in Britain, you'd expect to find similar things taken away in short order, either by unruly kids or actual thieves. I'd benefit from a reduction in crime in Britain, and a reduction in the fear of it and the preventative measures that I have to constantly take against it (so much so that I don't even think about routine behaviours like always locking cars and not leaving things on display in them, and certainly not leaving tools in the street). The rich would also benefit from such a reduction in crime. But the solution would inevitably involve a reallocation of wealth from the status quo, and the rich would lose *far* more to that reallocation, than they currently lose to crime - all the money they spend on security systems, bodyguards, bulletproof cars, ransoms, etc., all pale into significance compared to their collective loss from political redistribution.

Yes, and since your proposal is to *reduce* tax, it is going to have an impact on relative quality of life surely.

The point is that tax is redistributive. Whenever any individual succeeds in gaining a higher share of overall economic production via the market mechanism, the taxation mechanism then disgorges that gain somewhat. At the lower end, whenever any individual fails to achieve a sufficient share of overall economic production via the market mechanism, the 'taxation-credit' mechanism then steps in to supplement that income. By the state taking more in from the rich than it pays out to them, and correspondingly by paying more out to the poor than it takes in from them, individual incomes are brought more into line with the economic average.

I don't disagree with any of what you say, I just think you miss the point I was making, that the sorts of people I'm talking about don't have the sort of income where they can justify improving their "everyday comfort" if that might only erode their bargaining power further versus their landlord (by sinking money into the property). Admittedly the range of people I have in mind, suffer basically from lack of fittings, not square footage. You and I do not incur financial discomfort in risking "benefitting the landlord", whereas the sorts of people I'm thinking about would incur financial discomfort and cannot afford to subsidise landlords.

There must be half a dozen such people on this group who talk about the "feckless poor" and "penalising success", etc.

But you haven't answered the question. If you are so blase about wealth (and again I don't entirely disagree with your account of a wealthy lifestyle), why don't you support more redistribution, since even by your own account the rich will forfeit little, the desperate poor will be silenced, and in the meantime there ought to be a social and economic surplus created for everybody by the reduction in social tension.

I don't even believe you when you say there is no association "in any way". I think you're describing the perfectly legitimate position that additional tens or hundreds of thousands don't make much positive difference once you've got a reasonable basic amount by prevailing social standards, and in fact it can become hard and displeasurable work just to achieve such inflated income - I agree. Where I think you go wrong, and where I question what sort of poverty you could possibly have observed or experienced, is where you assert that having appreciably less than prevailing social standards also has no impact.

So for example, if you couldn't afford a bus ticket, clean clothes, a restaurant meal, a pint in the pub, or anything else of the sort for months or years on end, you're alleging that this would have no impact "in any way" on your happiness or quality of life.

I know, I hear the Robinson Crusoe anecdote at every opportunity, and there is still no satisfactory explanation within your own terms, for why you chose a life of comparatively unhappy wealthiness instead, or why you tend to promote a mode of social organisation that is completely at odds with the lifestyle you claim to have enjoyed so much.

But the extremes *are* what we are talking about. The real difference between a =A330k-a-year man and a =A3100k-a-year man is not that great, whereas the difference between a =A33k-a-year man (i.e. long-term dole) and a =A330k-a-year man is astronomical - in the latter case, there will be little if any common culture, outlook, or everyday experience of life, especially if the effects have been experienced over several generations.

We could of course go on to talk about the established super-rich on the opposite end of the scale, who will have had no real concern in their entire lives about finances or work, but I don't think I need to labour over describing that side of the coin.

I'm certainly not rich. I'm not saying 'the majority' of people suffer with the material comfort in their home. Speaking of the majority, I'd be more inclined to focus on their working conditions as being something that is increasingly adverse.

Oh come on! I honestly thought you meant guests that they were required to entertain. It's hardly a significant mental toll to have your own staff tending to the house - it's like saying the maids in a hotel are terribly bothersome.

No, you'd surely tell the butler to do so. Anyway, the routine of putting a dressing gown on is something that most of us do as a matter of course anyway. You really haven't made out your case that the need to be polite to friends, acquaintances, and miscellaneous strangers in public places, is akin to having paid house staff discreetly moving around completing their tasks.

Yes, because the fat person wants food more than they want thin, and it's pointless the fat (or their sympathisers) telling us about how food is so overrated and that it really would be better to be starving, as they guzzle down another plate of food. It's not that I think it is 'easy' for the rich to give up wealth - my contention with you is that you are in danger of denying that the rich are even addicted to wealth in the first place, quite apart from arguing how difficult it might be to undergo withdrawal.

I accept culture would have to change.

This only really applies to individuals. If the rich all take a step down at once, it's unlikely that any strong attachments will be suddenly made impossible.

It doesn't help when that same person is a promoter of that very idea. I don't have much sympathy for people who claim to be enchained by the very social restraints that they advocate.

So we should step in and help them?

So was I.

Neither was I. To give one example of what I was thinking about in the UK, most people on the dole don't have a car, in a society that depends heavily on cars for work and leisure.

I think you've tried your best to pretend otherwise henceforth.

Which is perfectly true, but I think you've overstated your case, since in your final analysis you conceded that people prefer wealth, and that was my position to start with (and nor was my position so extreme as to suggest that being wealthy was all milk and honey). Frankly, I think you've gone down the same dead-end route that Ricardo or JNugent (or one of the other crackers) did the other week, in suggesting that my views arise from some desire on my part to join the ranks of the rich, when on every occasion I can't be clearer that my desire is not a change of my position within this society, but a change in the system itself that would deliver benefits for everybody, though the cost of that change to the present rich would be the loss of their relative social and economic position.

I didn't say they did. The wealthy as a class do.

I do! I have similar views to you on the police, the security services, the judges, the moral backbone of politicians, etc.

It doesn't have to be "all a one-way street". It is just relatively more streets toward their direction than away.

Quite, but we're back to square one again, why do the wealthy spend all their time getting such a large slice of the pie in the first place, if it only creates conflict as others try to recoup it?

Who needs to take a holiday, if you're doing something all the time that brings you a great deal of satisfaction? No one is forcing such businessmen to behave in that way, and so far as social and cultural pressures on him are concerned, I'm all for change!

It would be a cinch to solve it by redistributing wealth. Look at Greece - it has no social or economic problems, other than the fact that external creditors now have too great a claim on its economic output and are refusing to relinquish it. So too in this country - the only problem most people are labouring under, is the weight of their debts owed to those who were wealthy enough to have capital to lend in the first place.

Yes, because I see the money given to the CEO of Tesco as being a claim on my hard-earned money also. More importantly, the single mother would probably be quite content with the offer of a =A330k-a-year job, whereas the CEO of Tesco would be outraged at the expectation that he take such a step down, so it is obvious where the real political problem lies and where the pressure to maintain the status quo comes from.

I disagree.

It was a long-winded way of saying that they live more strenuous lives than you do.

Rubbish. I simply do not believe that you become *more* inclined to do unpleasant tasks with increasing stress in your lifestyle. Isn't part of the reason for paying huge salaries to bankers, supposedly to make up for the stress of their lifestyle (since, logically within this argument, without the compensation the stress would make them disinclined to do such jobs)?

Then why is it that "lazy" bankers are being paid millions of pounds a year to overcome their disinclinations? You can't have it both ways, where the poor are told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, while the rich are told they need "motivation" of a financial kind.

I also refute the idea that the correct response to an unacceptably low rate of pay, is to either accept less money than someone already in work (so as to replace one decent position that somebody else is filling, with a less decent one than you are filling), or work harder and produce more value than someone already in work for no extra pay (with the same effect as previous). If people did that as a matter of routine within the market mechanism, and never refused to work at any rate or on any terms however poor, then the four yorkshiremen sketch would be rendered true to life.

But that means knowing a secound-hand outlet, and knowing someone with the tools who is willing to lend them, and it takes expertise to fit - which most people don't have.

Hell, I have the tools, expertise, and knowledge of suppliers, and even I don't know where you'd get such taps second-hand, and I've only relatively recently started seeing them in newer commercial bathrooms

- because indeed, the demand for such easy-clean, high-cleanliness devices, and the ability to provide the technology at a reasonable cost, is relatively recent.

I'm afraid not. No landlord, even a decent one, is going to replace a kitchen sink, because your grill pan cannot be completely submerged at once.

Comparing my current kitchen to what it replaced before it (1970s local authority), and setting aside the increase in size achieved by the demolition of a wall, one of the main benefits is smooth continuous worktop surfaces that wipe clean easily and have fewer difficult joins/corners where water, mould, and crap used to accumulate and which might require several passes of a cloth to clean plus occasional replacement of silicone (which became more frequent as the fittings deteriorated due to water ingress).

So too with the cooker, grease and food can no longer splash/fall down the sides or back of a free-standing unit, or splash up the wall behind it (there is now a stainless splashback for the hob).

The list goes on really. I don't claim that the chipboard is more durable than the solid wood units that they replaced. What the kitchen is as a whole, is aesthetically more pleasing (it has simpler lines and a more consistent appearance) and easier to use and maintain on a daily basis.

That depends on the contract. Anyway, that wasn't my point - the point was that the very poor do not enjoy the same quality of household fittings as you or I can, because they cannot afford them, and that imposes additional burdens across the board.

Functionality is typically related to matters of aesthetic. In particular, if one of its "functions" is to appear clean when cleaned, then a bathroom that continues to look dirty (for example, with mouldy silicones and stained grouts) is not functional in encouraging such cleaning.

So too, a bathroom with lots of complex surfaces, older materials that retain dirt, exposed pipework, deep corners, etc., all of which requires more time and particularly mental resources to clean (because the cleaning behaviour is more complex), discourages that cleaning or anyway consumes a disproportionate amount of available effort. Therefore again it is not "functional", whether it goes uncleaned or whether it consumes limited psychological resources that are better spent elsewhere (such as on child-rearing).

Presumably you don't bother cleaning the thing much, then, because you can't be simultaneously unconcerned about bathroom aesthetic, yet concerned enough to actually clean it.

Lol! Perhaps I have a keener eye for the built environment than you Cynic, but then again it has been my trade. I can tell you now, I instantly see through the sorts of charades you're suggesting, and if anything the sorts of frills you have in mind violate the principle today that the areas should be visually clean and minimally complex (not just because of its purely functional benefit, but because if nothing else it unburdens the mind with processing unnecessary stimulation).

In reality it's not a huge problem for me, which is why I haven't remedied the situation. As I say, if I was using the grill every day for a family, I'd have had a bigger sink by now in which to soak it I think - not because it alone makes some massive difference to my QoL, but because this and all the other little bits of time and effort spent organising the house and circumventing its inherent defects would add up to an excessive mental burden that would impair both my work and my leisure (which is, as I say, why these tasks were left specifically to women in the past).

The problem is, when you put in a moderate amount of further effort again, you realise that your conclusions the first time around were quite wrong. In the end, besides quibbling about the specifics of particular situations (when it was designed only to give substance to the point in general), your "fix" was to tell the "lazy" poor to pull themselves together.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 11:44:10 on Tue, 14 Feb

2012, Cynic remarked:

Thus fragmenting their customer base, with the "comfort" aspect having to move its focus upmarket from "drinking" to "eating".