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An idle mathematical question. Is the square of an irrational number always another irrational number? Or is it never an irrational number? Or is it sometimes one, sometimes the other? Just curious.
If you post this kind of thing on Facebook, I usually time it to see how long someone posts "Wikipedia says...." as if, duhhh, I had never heard of Wikipedia. There really ought to be a law forbidding any response to an online question where the response begins along the lines of "According to Wikipedia..."
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Which was a diversion before I even started. I was just thinking of paradoxes, contradictions, and the like. In the FT this morning Daniel Pimlott writes on how the savings ratio had become positive after a period in 2008 when we became net borrowers. He continues "While in the longer term this (a positive savings ratio) is seen as a necessary rebalancing of the economy away from consumption towards more production and investment, in the short term a too-rapid increase in savings could have devastating effects".
Hmm, I thought. And this situation would end, er, when?
In fact, what everyone wants is a higher savings ratio (so that people are prepared for their old age) and a lower savings ratio (so that the economy today keeps going). They get round this contradiction by saying that they want a higher savings ratio "in the long term", but higher consumption "in the short term".
It doesn't take a mastermind to spot that "in the long term" is something like "next month". It never actually arrives.
Eventually the pensions timebomb really does have to explode. And I'll even tell you where it will start -- in the local government sector, followed by the whole public sector. When you get to the stage that 80% of your local tax bills are going on pensions, people will get elected solely on the grounds that they will stop paying those pensions. When only the retired public sector is cushioned against inflation, people will be elected who want it to stop. And (worst case scenario), if all of those standing are in favour of keeping the status quo (because, of course, they benefit from it), then democracy will be in danger.
I have had chats with people who have been retired 10 years or more, and they look at me with total bafflement when I say that I am worried about my future. Most of these are so accustomed to a monthly stipend (often inflation-linked) that they just can't conceive of a life where that money was not coming in. That, as it were, is the basic. When I explain to them, slowly, that the amount in my pension pot would probably buy an annuity of about a tenner a month, it kind of dawns on them that people working today often have no safety net to look forward to at 60, 63 or 65. Such people are unlikely to look sympathetically on Council Tax Bills that pay for virtually nothing except someone else's inflation-linked deal.
It's all Lloyd George's fault, of course. He created the concept of the unfunded pension, and it's been Ponzi-ing away since 1909. When you look at the impact of the Madoff scheme, it's not difficult (although it is frightening) to imagine the impact of the implosion of a scheme that's been running 70 years longer than that.
Inflation in Russia in the 1990s virtually wiped out a generation of old people's savings. The "system" in the UK "protects" some retired people against even this. What is not realized is that inflation is, in a sense, a safety valve. When the numbers don't add up (which they often don't) inflation occurs to make them add up. So making a pension "inflation-proof" does not solve the problem. It just keeps the pressure building up until it explodes, more forcefully, elsewhere.
______________
If you post this kind of thing on Facebook, I usually time it to see how long someone posts "Wikipedia says...." as if, duhhh, I had never heard of Wikipedia. There really ought to be a law forbidding any response to an online question where the response begins along the lines of "According to Wikipedia..."
++++++++
Which was a diversion before I even started. I was just thinking of paradoxes, contradictions, and the like. In the FT this morning Daniel Pimlott writes on how the savings ratio had become positive after a period in 2008 when we became net borrowers. He continues "While in the longer term this (a positive savings ratio) is seen as a necessary rebalancing of the economy away from consumption towards more production and investment, in the short term a too-rapid increase in savings could have devastating effects".
Hmm, I thought. And this situation would end, er, when?
In fact, what everyone wants is a higher savings ratio (so that people are prepared for their old age) and a lower savings ratio (so that the economy today keeps going). They get round this contradiction by saying that they want a higher savings ratio "in the long term", but higher consumption "in the short term".
It doesn't take a mastermind to spot that "in the long term" is something like "next month". It never actually arrives.
Eventually the pensions timebomb really does have to explode. And I'll even tell you where it will start -- in the local government sector, followed by the whole public sector. When you get to the stage that 80% of your local tax bills are going on pensions, people will get elected solely on the grounds that they will stop paying those pensions. When only the retired public sector is cushioned against inflation, people will be elected who want it to stop. And (worst case scenario), if all of those standing are in favour of keeping the status quo (because, of course, they benefit from it), then democracy will be in danger.
I have had chats with people who have been retired 10 years or more, and they look at me with total bafflement when I say that I am worried about my future. Most of these are so accustomed to a monthly stipend (often inflation-linked) that they just can't conceive of a life where that money was not coming in. That, as it were, is the basic. When I explain to them, slowly, that the amount in my pension pot would probably buy an annuity of about a tenner a month, it kind of dawns on them that people working today often have no safety net to look forward to at 60, 63 or 65. Such people are unlikely to look sympathetically on Council Tax Bills that pay for virtually nothing except someone else's inflation-linked deal.
It's all Lloyd George's fault, of course. He created the concept of the unfunded pension, and it's been Ponzi-ing away since 1909. When you look at the impact of the Madoff scheme, it's not difficult (although it is frightening) to imagine the impact of the implosion of a scheme that's been running 70 years longer than that.
Inflation in Russia in the 1990s virtually wiped out a generation of old people's savings. The "system" in the UK "protects" some retired people against even this. What is not realized is that inflation is, in a sense, a safety valve. When the numbers don't add up (which they often don't) inflation occurs to make them add up. So making a pension "inflation-proof" does not solve the problem. It just keeps the pressure building up until it explodes, more forcefully, elsewhere.
______________
