Digital Taylorism – Why our Jobs are Getting Worse

This brilliant article from the Grauniad absolutely hit a nerve with me. It describes the reasons why I hate the management edifice around what my job has become, though at the moment what I do is okay – if only the blasted System would let me get on an do it with death-by-bureaucracy.

When I started work at my current company as a lowly grunt Assistant Engineer, I had the authority to fill in a purchase requisition for up to £500 without higher level authorisation, and that was about right for the level of work. It wasn’t generally abused, either.

Now I have to get authorisation from the next level up simply to buy a rail ticket, and that next level has to get the okay and a reference number from some other part of Business Operations. I don’t know what you have to do to buy pens and paperclips these days. The company’s perfectly entitled to introduce all this bureaucracy, but it was all snuck in while talking about employee empowerment and BS like that.

Software development used to be a creative process. It is now a revolting straitjacketed system where an idea gets posted to s Star Chamber whose purpose is to destroy anything that is innovative or potentially risky, then fire anything that gets through into another bureucratic process to make sure it fits in with a morass of process and policy definitions. Presumably the original purpose of the Star Chamber was something else but my description fits the most obvious results. For some reason we seem to take longer to get anything involving software to market, so we outsource more of  it to India. The main advantage the Indian guys have is they don’t seem to have to go through this process, though they don’t always have the gumption to apply common sense to the results, ending up with some classic howlers. This isn’t a Daily Mail-esque rant on Indian IT people – the contracts seem to be written in some peculiar way that almost prohibits initiative. They guys are bright enough but their hands are tied. You gets what you pays for, and we don’t want to pay for them to think. So we or our customers end up debugging the results, but hey, the cycle time is shorter, and Agile development is all about failing fast and frequently. Well, that’s how we seem to do it, it is meant to work differently.

Fortunately I got out of software into a one-off hardware project that will hopefully see me out I’d have throttled one of the process monkeys by now if I were in software now.

The problem is that technology has allowed bean-counters to micromanage our jobs at arm’s length. Taylor introduced ‘scientific management’ as a way of getting the American worker to do as they were told; it had the side effect of deskilling workers and de-humanising the workplace. As the Philip Brown from Praxis puts it

the twentyfirst century is the age of digital Taylorism. This involves translating knowledge work into working knowledge through the extraction, codification and digitalisation of knowledge into software prescripts and packages that can be transmitted and manipulated by others regardless of location.

The Graun follows on:

From now on, believe Brown and his colleagues, “permission to think” will be “restricted to a relatively small group of knowledge workers in the UK”. The rest will be turned into routine and farmed off to regional offices in eastern Europe or India.

Nice. I want out of that sort of environment. Working without thinking is like living without breathing to me.

The actual paper itself is a fascinating read. Basically, we are hosed.

Companies are using the very latest
technologies to produce high value-added goods and services
in the midst of third world poverty as they no longer require the
full array of institutional supports to provide the skills base that
we are accustomed to in the West.

Fasten your seat belts, folks, and adopt the brace position. If these guys are right we are stuffed in the West – there is nothing we can do to compete in the race to the bottom. As the Philip Brown et al say on page 15

The growth of this high end capacity in emerging economies is
likely to cause a serious challenge to the West as differences in
productivity and quality narrow, contributing to a reverse (Dutch) auction, reflecting a weakening in the trading positions of large numbers of middle class professionals, managers and technicians in OECD economies.

self-reliance, DIY and A-Levels

Building a packing table for the Oak Tree a couple of days ago, it struck me how much we’ve got used to buying in rather than do for ourselves compared to the last few decades. This raises the costs of living today in all sorts of ways. Our neighbours use an ironing service, there is a company that makes its living going round with a pressure washer cleaning out some people’s wheelie bins after they’ve been emptied. For those with children there are any number of child-related services, from childcare itself to after-school classes and activities.

All of these services add regular increments to many people’s cost of living. None of the increments in isolation looks particularly onerous, but the cumulative effect is quite remarkable. Take the regular outgoings my parents had in the 1970s

• mortgage
• car
• electricity
• gas
• water
• land-line phone
• rates (equated to Council Tax nowadays)
• TV licence

and now take a look at the extras a typical modern family would have on top of those costs

• mobile phone subscription(s)
• Sky TV/cable
• broadband
• childcare
• second car

They could easily end up needing another £2000-5000 a year. They wouldn’t necessarily feel any better off for it. but it is still a hit to their pockets.

With the table I was making, the advantage of building farm equipment is it is cheaper than buying, natch, and the advantage for me as builder is that rustic construction adds charm. I am no cabinet-maker, my carpentry is imprecise, so outdoor construction is good for me. It has the satisfaction of working with real stuff with my hands, unlike how I earn a living at the moment. Plus it costs less than £50 in wood, whereas it would have cost me £350 from Amazon. Granted, that table looks nicer, but it’s the wrong height since you stand at a packing table

I learned working with tools and DIY as an adult, because though my Dad worked as a maintenance fitter he did not want to pass this on because he wanted me to aspire to better things. Which is roughly what happened, so he did well, although as a tyro and skint householder I had to learn plumbing and the like from books, colleagues and trial and error.

Once again, thinking about what he did for a living, companies used to repair equipment in far more detail than they do now. If something at work needed repairing, Dad would manufacture the replacement by making it from materials, often turning parts on a lathe and using tools, both metal and wood parts, and the company had him and a few other guys doing this.

Nowadays, this would be contracted out to the supplier and they would swap larger parts. I observed the same changes when I worked at the BBC – when I worked in studios we would fault-find down to the component level and replace individual resistors and transistors. This started to move towards replacing sub-assemblies when I left, and now I would imagine most items would be on a maintenance contract with the supplier, who would swap the whole item and simply throw out faulty modules.

In short, we’ve become even purer consumers; we don’t fix anything any more, and we are far less self-reliant as a result. Life costs more as a result, since we have to replace rather than repair. As for building stuff from scratch, we seem to have neither the time nor the money. When I look at, say, this  Popular Mechanics from 1971 I’m amazed at the level of skill assumed – I wouldn’t know what some of the hand tools are for, never mind use them, and yet many articles assume this level of craft skill.

Why it’s not the employers getting shafted by A-Level grade inflation, it’s the kids!

Every crabby old git has a chance to take a cheap shot at A Level results when they come out round about this time of year, so I might as well have my turn here. This graph (okay it is from the Daily Fail but the issue of grade inflation has enough other publicity) says it all.

There was an interesting thread on this board, where it shows that the reasons for the change has been lost in the mists of time for people taking A levels now. I am old enough to remember how this worked before the kink in the graph, and the explanation is simple.

When I took my A levels in the late 1970s, they were graded in terms of relative levels. That is, about 8% of the candidates got an A grade. This system, called a norm reference, is self-calibrating. It is inevitable that some years the papers will be harder than in other years, but this means that one year the A pass mark would be 80%, if it were harder the next year the pass mark would be 75%for example.

This delivers results that are useful for employers and universities. In practice, employers and unis have only so many places. They know roughly how many people they want to take on, and if they have academic requirements, they can then say they want to take the top 8% (or 80% – their needs will vary) and adjust pay rates accordingly if they are employers. Be less selective and you can pay less, but you may then accept you get people who are less smart. Smartness is not the only requirement at work and is a hindrance for some jobs, but at least you can sift the candidates and place them relative to their peers.

The downside of this method is that some candidates fail, or at least get grades that are worthless in the marketplace. At some point it was deemed that this was a Bad Thing, because some people’s self-esteem is harmed by knowing they aren’t as bright as other people. For some reason this was so upsetting that they had to cover it up.

I won’t go all Atlas Shrugged on you, but it’s a fact that ability is not spread evenly at all. Some people are stupid. There. I’ve managed to say it. Some people aren’t geniuses, much as it may come as a surprise to their parents. For instance, I wasn’t bright enough to get into Cambridge. Usain Bolt has the edge on me in the 100m too, I’m sad to say. The problem here, is that fixing the exams to cover up this nasty little fact of life may have made the dim feel better but it doesn’t allow the clever to shine.

Two things were done, one was to pretend that the exams tested an absolute standard, immediately destroying the feedback mechanism that calibrated the difficulty of the exams to the pass mark. A norm referenced system that allocates marks as a percentage of candidates is not easy to fiddle, and I find it hard to believe that the one year’s 300,000 A level entrants are going to be that much brighter or dimmer than the next year’s. A criterion referenced system is easy as pie to fiddle, because who judges the difficulty, and how do you measure difficulty  other than by how many people pass? It’s just all too open to abuse, and the incentive to up the pass rate is always there.

Because the norm reference was lost, the Uniform Mark Scheme was apparently an attempt to nut variations between different paper setting boards.

There were other changes that made it possible to increase grades. When I took A levels you only resat an exam if you had failed, and you had to take the whole exam again. Now with the modular system you can resit individual components, keeping the best mark for each component, assembling your A level one piece at a time.  If I were a prospective employer I would want to know resit details. Something gives me the feeling that someone who passes first time is perhaps better than someone who needs to take five bites at the cherry

The tragedy here is borne by the young people that the current system fails – the academically gifted who can’t shine in this system because the dim bulbs are being lit up from behind. It is not the exam takers who have failed, it is the designers of a system that has lost its ability to discriminate.

A second perversity of the British university system is the ramping up of admissions targets, from 7% when I entered university about 30 years ago to 50% now. There is an implicit lowering of of the bar in that. It is possible that better nutrition, health-care and education has improved the level of intelligence somewhat over the years, but probably not by that much

Compare the mayhem of UK clearing with this description of the German numerus clausus which seems to manage the numbers and indeed the studied subjects. Such a system, however, is only possible because the Abitur (A-level equivalent) still discriminates by ability. Obviously this means those that don’t do well in the Abitur don’t get to realise their dreams, taking a corresponding hit to their self-esteem. In Germany it seems this is still considered acceptable.

Eternally whingeing employers are also to blame – when I started work employers accepted that graduates coud not immediately be plugged into a job but had to be trained – for several weeks in the BBC’s case, before they could be let loose on the expensive and potentially dangerous equipment and expensive studio time. There seems to be a lot less preparedness among employers to train young people, and then some ghastly whingeing when it all goes pear shaped. Employers are entitled to expect that public schooling provides a decent level of literacy and numeracy. The rest is up to them, if they want degree courses better suited to their needs then sponsor them!

For all that I wish the A-level students all the best and good luck in your chosen careers. I can’t tell which ones of you to really congratulate, but that’s hardly your fault, and hopefully we will all find a way to sort it out in the long run.

The Pinch – David Willetts says it’s the Baby Boomers Who are Wrecking the Economy

David Willetts is clearly a very clever chap, and I learned a heck of a lot about the sociology and history of Britain from this book.

I’m part of the Enemy cited by Willetts as the source of a lot of the financial ills present and upcoming, though I am not yet part of the 50+ set he defines as possessing most of the wealth in Britain.

Reading the book was curiously frustrating and rewarding – Willetts is very intellectual, and his writing can be turgid.

His book was fabulous at detail and insight, and yet poor at the helicopter overview of the situation, and he laboured his points. I came to understand how high house prices in London favoured the Polish immigrants labourers against Liverpool labourers (the Poles are ready to sleep many to a room reducing their costs because they will use the money to set themselves up in lower-cost Poland later, whereas the Liverpudlians haven’t got that advantage).

It’s always going to be hard for me to accept that I am part of a sociopathic menace destroying the fabric of British society, but I just don’t feel Willetts carries his case well. For sure, the baby boomers have caused enough problems, however, I think he eggs his case far too much.

Take the classic bugbear, housing. I bought my first house at 29, and it really wasn’t a good move at all. Look at my age – older than many Gen Yers are trying to get a house nowadays, it took me longer in my career to get there.  People now don’t seem to be prepared to live in crummy rented accommodation shared with others in their young adulthood – I shared rooms, then flats, then houses for the early part of my working life. It wasn’t until that first house that I had exclusive use of a toilet and bathroom, whereas now even student accommodation is ensuite.

Some things have changed not for the better. I wish university were at the same penetration level as when I went there. Send only 7% of our young people to uni and we can afford to give the poorer ones grants. Send 50% to uni and we just can’t manage that. Are today’s students prepared to take the downside though – tougher exams that weed out the majority of applicants? It’s easy to point out the things that the boomers had going for them in their youth that people that same age don’t have now, but if you’re going to do that you have to also allow for the fact that some of these good things were nowhere near as widely spread as they are now!

The world of work has got worse, because of globalization and technical advances, both of which favour capital over labour. It is possible that the baby boomers can be charged with not seizing the moment, and directing our societies towards using the increased wealth to shorten the working week and give us increased leisure. Other than that, I don’t feel that the change itself was a result or creation of the boomers, it was a result of accumulated knowledge, better communications and capitalism red in tooth and claw. It’s not as if other political systems weren’t tried in the 1960s onwards, but market capitalism seemed to give the least worst result.

Other things, however, have changed and are better. The world is richer now, the anticipated loss of disposable income as we unwind the debt-fuelled party of 1997 to 2007 will still leave us with far more money, consumer trinkets and baubles than we had in 1987.

Yes, the boomers should have saved more in their middle age rather than pumping up house prices on cheap debt then blowing it all on consumer goods without paying the capital down. This hopefully should unwind in the coming years, and those boomers that believed prices would always rise will get to eat the crow; they have less time to earn the difference needed to fill the hole.

The boomer generation now holds most of the wealth in Britain because, well, after 40 years of working people get to accumulate some wealth. When I started work as a youth I also observed how it was always greybeards who owned everything – my landlords were greybeards, the bosses were, in those days bankers were. It didn’t seem fair to me then, either. Such is the human condition

Willetts book is a fascinating though difficult read, but more for a take on the unusual sociology and history of Britain. He certainly does come up with a litany of the boomers’ failures, but doesn’t quite carry the argument that it is a premeditated land grab in my opinion.

I do think there is some serious crap coming down the line, as a combined storm of resource crunch, growing population and energy shortages. Would it have happened if we had an even size of generations? Most likely.

Our problem, Mr Willetts, isn’t the size of one particular generation relative to the others. It is the increasing size of humanity’s population in total compared to the rest of the biosphere, and its impact upon that. We can address some of the resulting issues, but it isn’t going to be easy.

There’s an entertaining riposte to Willetts’ book from Boris Johnson on his blog, together with a response from Willetts and a comment that summarises Two-Brains Willetts writing style

Perhaps you talk better than you write, otherwise quite why Boris Johnson would want you at a dinner party is unclear – perhaps your cooking skills are more advanced than your light-bulb changing abilities? The article drags on and on in the most soulless fashion when the same points could have been made in a quarter of the wordage.

Banks Don’t Make People Bankrupt, People make People Bankrupt

There was a bizarre piece on Woman’s Hour today, asking how is it that so many women are going bankrupt nowadays.

One of the reasons advocated is that more women are exposed to the economy by being wage earners etc and that part of the argument is fair enough, there are more in the line of fire.

Then we had Alexis, who got herself into £31,000 worth of debt. Let’s take a look at some of her reasoning:

Jenni (interviewer) “How did it [your debt] get so high”?

Alexis “It got so high because I was able to borrow so much money”

WTF? Can this lady run safely with scissors, is she allowed to cross the road on her own?

Alexis “unfortunately, nobody put the brakes on me except myself”

Jenni (incredulous tone of voice) “Hang on, what were you spending it on?”

Alexis “Anything, I genuinely was shopping constantly, I had this attitude that life is short, and if I wanted it I should have it, and we do live in this society where we are told, ‘Look at all these worderful things you can have’ look at all these wonderful things these celebrities have got, and why don’t you have it and if you can’t afford it just borrow the money”

Prof Sheila Crispin then goes on to say that people think that “if the bank is prepared to lend me 20,000, then I must be able to afford it.”

Since when did adults get infantilised in this way? There are some things that have hidden risks that are hard to gauge and quantify. But there’s not much that is hard about spotting the risk of borrowing £1000 when you can’t see a way to paying it back.

I’m not talking about to people unfortunate enough to lose their jobs, or have other unforeseen financial events catch them out. This was a woman who sounded coherent, reasonably intelligent and who had finally seen the error of her ways. But was she raised by wolves? Why didn’t her parents teach her the basics

all advertising is a story designed to make you want to spend

I’m sick of people of both genders blaming the banks for making them overspend. Banks have made their own mistakes, and been greedy on their own behalf, but they aren’t a conspiracy to make us overspend. They held up a mirror to our own greed and lack of responsibility. We cannot blame the mirror if the ugliness of the reflected image disturbs us. A failure of macroeconomic policy and regulation made this worse, but nobody had their arm twisted by a banker in a balaclava holding a gun to their head, saying

borrow this £31,000 or we shoot your husband and kids

It just didn’t happen.

Greed is Good – are Animal Spirits returning to the Square Mile

I did some work in London this Monday, near St Paul’s. It was a pleasant day, so I walked down from Liverpool Street rather than taking the Tube. What struck me was for a country that was in danger of running into the second dip of a double dip recession, there seemed to be a lot of money sloshing around and how much buzz there was. Twenty and thirty-something guys with tailored suits and their hands jammed in their pockets or on the phone seemed to ooze brash bravado, set against the occasional refined clicking of designer high heels from pencil-skirted women.

people at the foot of the Gherkin

The Daily Wail has an article spitting bricks about a party sponsored by Square Mile magazine, where bankers are living it up. While it makes easy journalism and pumps up the angry readers who are looking for someone to blame, I don’t share their angle one bit.

I’m quite glad to see they’re partying and chuffed to see banks are making money again. The reason is that as taxpayers we subbed the banks a shocking amount of money over the last couple of years. I’d quite like some of it back. Let’s face it, a profit wouldn’t be such a bad thing. In the end Britain isn’t going to become the workshop of the world again, we don’t have the skills. And yet, it seems, we have some animal cunning for the world of finance.

The near-death experience of the financial system does show that perhaps we want to be a bit more careful. In particular, the end of Gordon Brown’s tenure seemed to have an awful lot of money spent on stuff that wasn’t perhaps necessary, and Britain isn’t as rich as we thought we were. The banks and their problems were the lightning conductor that flashed over after the huge misallocation of resources, but I am not convinced that they were the cause of the financial crisis.

We borrowed too much on our credit cards, we did not pay off our mortgages, preferring to raise loans against the equity to go on holiday, buy cars and all the other trappings of consumerism. The banks  didn’t make us do it, they let us do it. They aren’t our mothers.

We need their recovery, both to get our money back and also to buy us enough time to work out what went wrong and how to forestall it in future. There is a theory that suggested that some of the excesses were due to regulations such as Glass-Steagall set in place in the 1930s but rolled back as the people who experienced the Great Depression retired from the workforce. The reason for the checks and balances set up eighty years ago were forgotten. Regulatory bodies had forgotten that financial crises do occur and tend to be all-consuming, and were hopelessly outgunned in terms of intellectual resource and publicity by the industry calls that it is different this time. It is never different this time.

The archetypal symbol of the BSD

Perhaps every generation needs to be reminded that capitalism has boundary conditions. We will have other problems to face in the years to come. I find some cheer to be had that the animal spirits seem to be returning to the City. Yes, the BSDs are louche loudmouths with execrable taste. But I’m glad to see them back. They are signs among others that our shattered financial system may be on the mend. I would rather the taxpayer makes a decent profit on what seemed to be an impossible bet, and accept the partying for now, than screw the whole sector down with heavy regulation and have it chunter along in low gear for years. Unpleasant as it may look, this healing process needs to be well underway before any of the benefits get into the rest of the economy.

Of course, we would do well to work out what exactly it is that we want of a financial system. Perhaps we do want to separate investment banking from what used to be called retail banking. However, as the Iceland banks debacle showed, retail depositors cannot discriminate risk that well, so the bad drives out the good when there is a government bank deposit guarantee. If we don’t want to bail out banks in the future, we may have to accept our responsibilities and be prepared to lose our savings if we chase particularly high interest rates.

This is just hearsay, of course, my subjective impressions of a sunny couple of hours in the City. And yet some of the figures show that life stirs anew in the Rough Beast, its muscles rippling as it feels the fires of Mammon once again -

Lloyds

Barclays

H SBC

RBS

seems a straight flush, covering most of the big British banks.

Sir John Grieve, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, says pretty much the same thing on the Today programme

“the bank results are good news, we stepped in to rescue the banks in order to put them on their feet so they could make a profit, so we shouldn’t complain when actually we succeed.”

Size matters - Mammon is bigger than God in the City of London

My Escape Plan

Like anyone aiming to quit paid employment, my escape plan has a large financial component to it. However, reading Dreamer’s inspiring story of how she has made her plan real, reminded me that there is also a non-financial part of it too. People do not live by bread alone, and I have consolidated a lot of the intangible parts without considering them as an escape plan.

You have to take a view on what the future holds to execute an escape plan. The reason is that leaving paid employment means an enormous loss is power and direction – relying on capital rather than income means my trajectory is largely determined by what I have when leaving. There is little chance to make mid-flight corrections.

My vision of the economic future

I have a quandary here, because my view of the future is at significant variance with a lot of people, including some people whose view I respect. I am not sure I am right. The general view, which is that the turmoil of recent years has been a temporary aberration of the sort that occasionally afflicts capitalism and normal service will be resumed shortly, is at variance with my feeling that the myth of our time, continuous growth, is about to fail us.

Worse still, I have insufficient information to get a feel of when I expect the increasing world middle class population’s demand to exceed the limiting effects of peak oil.

I may retire, grow old, see a few more economic cycles and hopefully die peacefully in my bed before world demand overwhelms peak oil. We may solve nuclear fusion before then, though energy security is not the only hazard humanity faces. Something else might turn up – one of the bewitching aspects of the continuous growth myth of our time is that just when things seemed lost, so far something has turned up, like the mid-20th century energy-fuelled Green Revolution in agriculture.

In that case, investing to set myself on as best a path to deal with peak oil is a serious opportunity cost. I need a stake in business as usual too, so I choose to play both ends – invest effort and skills in the post-peak ready scenario and at the same time I hedge this by investing assuming that Britain is booming again – or at least not taking on too much water.

If you want results fast, use great force with extreme prejudice

Yoda, he of the sticking out ears in the original geek-fest Star Wars was a plug-ugly sucker, but he had a point when he berated somebody “do or do not. Do not try” If you want to retire early, you aren’t going to be living an Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle. You’re just not going to get there clipping coupons and skipping lattes at Starbuck’s.

I realised in 2008 that working in an office is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life. Some events before then had made me re-evaluate things, but being targeted by some punk at work to make up his numbers showed me that the world of work had changed somewhat since I started. I wanted results, and I wanted them in years, not decades. Months would have been even better

Extraordinary results demand extraordinary efforts. That means cold turkey on consumerism, it means less is more all round. You need a lot of capital to retire early, in the order of about 20x your outgoings. None of the ways I can think of doing this don’t involve a serious hit on lifestyle compared with most others. The secret is to spend less than you earn, big-time. It means saving well over half my take-home pay, and a fair amount of my pre-tax pay too.

Young people may want to consider working in some unpleasant environment abroad for a year or so; these are usually financially rewarding to compensate for their unpleasantness or cultural dislocation. There are plenty of people that made their fortunes in the oil service industry, or working in the Middle East, where as long as you can avoid trouble and stay off the hooch then you can be made in a year or two. In the past, the military offered opportunities to break the mould, like this report of working 19 months on the Cold War Distant Early Warning Line.

The common thread on all of these is that if you want to build up the cash to do something different to most of your fellow men then you have to live in a different way to them.

The same applies to me. With two-thirds of a working life behind me, I have built up some capital, by living differently to many of my colleagues – my house is a semi where most of them live in detached houses, and I paid off my mortgage over the years rather than extract the equity to buy more house or go on holidays. But it’s not terribly different from the typical middle-class lifestyle. So if I want to retire early, then I have to hit the financial goal hard. Jacob from ERE tells us that it is possible to achieve early retirement in five years. With similar determination, therefore, in theory it would be possible for me to achieve it in less than two years; I already have 2/3 of the amount saved up in the conventional way plus a paid-off house.

Non-conventional investment – the tin hat portfolio

So my escape plan has two parts. The tin-hat portfolio finds a good meeting with DGF’s life-long dream of becoming a commercial grower using sustainable, low-carbon permaculture. I don’t understand it at all, I was born in a city, I am not into the digging and planting and harvesting side of things.

However, I can invest some skill and energy in the construction of things that every grower needs, like cold frames, buildings, energy control systems and temperature control. As well as the satisfaction of creating something tangible at the end, a reward absent from too many modern jobs, it improves the efficiency of the land use and effort.

As well as this some capital assets like polytunnels and the like which extend the growing season or make exotics possible give me a return on capital, which is the hardest part of turning savings into income these days. Businesses can turn capital into income. From a tin hat POV this particular enterprise hedges some kinds of hit to the food supply and rocketing food prices. I would find life as a vegetarian lacking the finer gastronomic things in life, but it would keep the wolf from the door. It also takes us out of the money economy for some our own consumption. Obviously in normal conditions it puts us more into the money economy from the produce sales, which is the right way to be in the money economy – a producer, not consumer

This unconventional part of my portfolio therefore also does something for me, even if I am wrong, Peak Oil is a chimera and things carry on as usual. It will also be interesting, practical and fun at times.

The general problem with saving money, turning it into a non-financial capital asset such as a business or property, and trying to live off the return on the capital is that many capital assets come in large illiquid lumps.  These have to be sold to realise any gains. Take, for example, a house – it may have gone up to £100,000 but to realise that you have to sell it to someone; even if it’s a buy-to-let property there are serious transaction costs. If you just happen to need £20,000 then you have a problem, you now have to find a smaller property to preserve the £80,000.

This is why most people use financial assets to do this job, but under certain scenarios those financial assets get written off to virtually zero. I do not feel that the probablility of those scenarios is vanishingly small over the next 30 years.

I used to know a very old person in Germany who had lost their life savings in financial crises – twice. When you hear the tone of voice of someone who has known that, you get a different kind of knowledge from reading about it in a book. You understand that the thin line that holds the edifice we call finance has its limits, and under certain kinds of societal stress it may fail under the load.This is usually more of a problem for people who have capital in financial assets than those living on earnings.

This collective memory underpinned the peculiar German abhorrence of inflation and the preparedness of the Deutsche Bundesbank to pay almost any price to keep inflation of the Deutsche Mark low in the 1960′s and 70s when other European countries let it rip – all the way to 26% in the case of the UK.

In the West we have been fortunate to have lived through a benign financial environment since the Second World War where this hasn’t happened recently. However, it has happened elsewhere in the world over that time – Argentina, Zimbabwe, the USSR, the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s.

The conventional portfolio

The second part of my portfolio is more conventional. It consists of a mix of ETFs, ETCs and investment trusts. I struggled with the latter, as these are actively managed and I have endless repetitions of the passive investing mantra to get over.

FWIW I’m unconvinced that continual pound-cost averaging works. Circumstances and luck have made me a pound-cost-averaging buyer when the market has been low and a forced seller when the market was higher than average. However, until I had a need for an income I found the index fund approach the easiest to have success with.

However, investment trusts have a good track record of paying dividends, and these are useful enough for a spread of ITs to give me the income I want to top up my pension, with the advantage that if I do it in an ISA it is not treated as income so I don’t get taxed on top, though dividends are taxed at source in the bizarre tax structure of the UK.

They seem to have the advantage of the income being stable over the long term. I don’t want to fret about investments and keep on churning them to release an income, so I will shift slowly from ETFs. High-yield ETFs such as IUKD that I was using are skewed in composition by the need to chase yield, which is a side effect I hadn’t thought about and didn’t want.

The largest part of my conventional portfolio is my final salary pension. It performs the position that bonds do in a self-select pension, a reasonably stable investment. However, since it is from a private employer, rather than government-backed public sector, and there is a deficit, I don’t consider it risk-free. Therefore I will draw it early – which will reduce the annual income from the pension since they will be paying it for more than the 20 years they expect me to live after 60. That means that I get some of it out before any risks/threats to its financial stability, and it is why I need to adopt ERE’s approach to saving enough capital to top it up.

Since pensions are considered income and taxed, drawing early means I get much more of it before paying income tax, which is all to the good in my view. My top-up income is derived from ISAs, which are not currently taxed, so I aim to pay minimal tax. I have paid an awful lot of income tax in my 30-year working life, and I’ve had enough for a while. I have done my part for society. If I get a State pension at 68 that will be nice, but I’m not counting on it, by then I expect the UK economy to be so hammered they’ll turn round and means test it or scrap it as unaffordable.

So I have a decent amount of diversity in my investment structure, in terms of the nature the investments and the spread. I can lose one of the three elements without going broke, though if the pension goes bust I may have to run down capital elsewhere.

The main problem with my escape plan is that the escape is two years off. I will have been at it for three and a half years by the time it comes to fruition. Saving 70% of one’s income is difficult to live with – I have the downside of a job with a toxic management structure without using the upside of the money. The halfway point is a nasty part of any difficult project – it is easy to lose hope, since the distant shoreline is not in view and yet much of the losses have been committed without return.Like Dreamer did, I continually re-evaluate if I can shorten the gap, but the maths do not change when revisited.

Finance is only part of a good escape plan. I am not a minimalist, and a big part of quality of life is who you are with and where you are as well as what you have. I have made good progress on these areas over my working life. In that I am different from many ER bloggers, who are sometimes discontented with their situation in life as well as finances. Much of that is simply being older. Getting these aspects of life right takes a lot of time; my 20s and 30s had much angst in them too I suspect some of that angst is part of the human condition.

The Defining Myth of Our Culture

Many people view the word myth as almost synonymous with ‘story’ or ‘fairy-tale’. This sells myth appallingly short, for it is much more that that, a trope that can give meaning and context to a whole culture.

Myths can define a culture, giving a people a shared world-view, a common set of assumptions from which to experience the world. We may sneer and say the myths were wrong, for instance the view that the Earth is at the centre of the universe, requiring byzantine wheels within wheels to explain the movement of the planets in the sky. And yet even such a world-view is good enough to farm successfully, it was good enough for Ptolemy to be able to predict planetary motion reasonably well.

Religion is often a defining myth, indeed Christianity has probably been the defining myth of the West for much of its written history.

We believe, of course, that we are more sophisticated. We don’t need a myth. But we have one

Our myth is continual growth

Like Ptolemy’s geocentricity, it needs to be true enough to explain many observations. From where I’m standing it explains most things. I grew up in a world of coal fires, frost on the inside of windows in winter and pipes that froze up in the cold and vacuum tubes in the radio.

We now have central heating, iPods and a bewildering choice of all sorts of things. That’s growth for you, and pretty much continual growth at that. I’m not complaining, but I don’t think I’ll see another 30 years of it at the same rate.

So the myth of continual growth is a good myth for our times. Our economic system appears to be predicated on it, and until now it has worked pretty well. However, most natural systems have limits, beyond which they won’t go. Draw too much water from a well, and you don’t have any any more.

It is this part of our myth that I think is breaking down. Humanity is continually adding to its numbers, we are consuming more and more energy and we are using more and more mineral resources. At some time this has got to stop increasing. The Club of Rome looked at this in the 1970s, and produced a seminal work, Limits To Growth. People hated it, because it challenged the defining myth of the Western world. Few people that panned it had actually read it, the title pretty much said it all and they wanted none of it.

I borrowed an updated copy from the library recently. It wasn’t as incendiary as I had been led to believe. It said that there were natural limits to growth, in several areas, energy and food growing capability being two of the main ones. It proposed husbanding resources and managing the transition to a steady-state society, with a stable human population growing food in a sustainable way.

The way we grow food at the moment is not sustainable, requiring prodigious amounts of fossil fuel for machinery and fertiliser. It knackers the soil as well, which will seriously spoil our day if we need to farm without the help of oil-derived products. We are just as likely to find out we are running short of oil in terms of price spikes at Tesco’s supermarket as we are to find out at empty petrol pumps.

The updated versions of Limits to Growth make the tart observation that we have collectively failed to take the steps recommended in the 1970s, even though there was a wake-up call in the oil price shock early in that decade.

I think this myth is beginning to fail us. Oil production is flatlining, despite there being over a billion new middle-class aspirants in China and India ready and willing to take up the slack where the economically moribund West is rolling back.

All sorts of other indicators are suspicious, too.

Take university education, for example. When I went to university, only 7% of school-leavers went to university, and many applicants failed. I applied to Cambridge, and though I managed okay on the subject exams (Cambridge tested entrants itself in those days, I don’t know if it is still allowed to do that) I didn’t even understand half the questions on the general studies papers. It was fair enough. I failed because I wasn’t bright enough, though at least I got into Imperial as a second choice.

I have no idea what makes Labour choose the  nutty target of 50% of school-leavers going to university. Why, FFS? University starts to look more like a parking bay for school leavers to hide the fact that the economy isn’t providing useful work for them. The parking fees are outrageous, too, so as a by-product it is damning them to debt so they become pliable debt-slaves.

That is such a rude thing to do as a society to our young people. We pick on them when they are starry-eyed, and sell them an empty dream that costs them over a year’s median wage, and 4% of their allotted time on earth upfront. If we can’t help them because the myth of our culture is failing and our economy is so damaged that it does not have enough middle-class jobs requiring a university degree, then we should let them make their own decision, not sell them this expensive pup at the beginning of their working lives, when they can least afford it.

We should cut those university places by 80% and make the exams discriminate between the bright and the not so bright. Then support those that do get in to university, that means grants, not debts, assuming that we do have a requirement for trained engineers, scientists, historians, medics, etc. We’ll get our cash back in taxes.

The 90% of school-leavers that don’t get in will still get a strategic benefit. Though their precious self-esteem may take a hammering, they won’t be clocking up debts chasing the will’o'the wisp of a graduate career, and it will also put paid to piss-taking employers demanding a degree to work in a call centre or wait on tables. You don’t need a degree to do that. In the past those not going to uni were sometimes supported via employers with vocational qualifications like HNC/Ds, practical apprenticeships or they simply did without and got on with the serious business of earning a living. All these alternatives have been flattened into the one-size-fits-all notion of pay-as-you-go university.

The curious futility of higher education is one indicator of the economy running out of steam. There are others – the bizarre level of house prices in the UK is another. At some point since the 1970s, we had the choice, to work more hours and make more money to buy more Stuff, or to take longer holidays. We went for the more Stuff, and no, I don’t recall being asked which I’d prefer either. Then crazily we went and instead of buying more stuff we decided to all make houses more expensive and tie up most of our national wealth (or tolerate the inflation that appeared to be wealth) in the numbers printed in estate agents. It’s not that we got any richer for it all – the vast majority of British “homeowners” live in houses owned by a bank or building society. So the banks end up making a packet from the interest.

Another example of things going wrong is in the sheer level of consumer crap that abounds. Take this delightful article, for instance, on best toothbrush holders. If that isn’t a sign that we have collectively lost the plot, I don’t know what is. Even the ghastly quality of the industrial design indicates an existential decadence.

So what will the world look like, if the myth of our time turns out not to be true?

In some ways I am living one alternative. As part of my escape plan, I stopped buying nearly all consumer crap. I’ve still got everything I had before, I simply haven’t added to it. What I do spend money on is tools, so I can make things I need cheaper. With that I include safety equipment, because that is investing in my health. I bought a bike, for a safer riding position commuting to work, this is an investment in reducing travel costs that will be recovered by Christmas. I replaced a fridge freezer, becuase I measured the old one as consuming so much power the new one would pay for itself in a year.

And I do celebrate the odd birthday going out for a meal with DGF and we spend a bit too much on wine. I don’t have cable, or Sky, or a mobile phone, or an iPod. I don’t need these – because I don’t watch much TV, work supplies me with a perfectly serviceable mobile and if I want to listen to music I want to hear it properly on my hi-fi, and if I’m on my bike I want to be able to hear the cars about to overtake me, not to mention the birds singing.

That’s not a criticism of any of those things per se. For someone with a boring commute an iPhone can be a godsend, and if sport is your thing you probably have to suck it up and pay the Digger his due. But they’re expensive to run. And they’re part of the myth of our culture; we didn’t need any of them 20 years ago, they are the result of continuous growth.

My story, of course, is a benign alternative to the myth of our time, a simple stasis at current levels. It applies to capital assets, things like buildings and land. It doesn’t apply to continuous inputs, like energy, though I have attacked that with some success. I have reduced my electricity consumption to < 4KWh per day which is less than half the average UK household usage of 3300kWh p.a = 9kWh per day.

This is still deadly unsustainable. One British Standard Horse is good for 746W, so if I get two horses and run them in the living room for two hours, which I think is the longest time you can run a horse flat out, I would be okay, conversion efficiencies notwithstanding. There isn’t enough room in the garden to grow the hay, so I am SOL for sustainable energy *. Half of this goes to running my (A-class efficiency) fridge freezer, so next time you take a look at your fridge-freezer think of that sweat-streaked equine pounding away for two hours each day to keep your milk and frozen peas in good condition if oil runs out. And make sure you close the door properly – get that wrong and you’ll probably kill the poor beast.

Believers in the magical properties of CFL light bulbs should note that I mainly use incandescent bulbs and a LED reading light. A household with adults only does not need to use CFLs, other than in hallways. Energy-efficiency is about hitting the measurable power hogs first. Never underestimate the energy-saving capabilities of the humble light switch set to the off position.

* I know I haven’t taken into account the energy for transportation, heating, the energy to grow food etc etc. There’s only so much apocalyptic exuberance a guy can handle in one day

I hope that the defining myth of our culture continues to explain how the world plays out, despite the increasing world population and apparently limiting oil production. I’m not omniscient, and it is perfectly possible that I am pumping the hazards up out of all proportion. The bearish argument always sounds smarter.

The more likely alternative, IMO, which greenies call Contraction and Convergence will result in a very serious loss of living standards in the developed world which has built much of its living standards on the basis of easily obtainable energy. If and when that energy returns to a little bit above what it was before the Industrial Revolution, the amount of energy per head will be a lot less, because there are so many more of us (about twice as many as since Queen Victoria died in 1901) in the UK than there were before the Industrial Revolution. Technology may help us, at least with electricity to some extent, but a lot of technology depends on cheap energy to mine and refine specialised raw materials. C&C is a hard sell for politicians, it fails the “what’s in it for me?” test. What’s in it for you? How about “Well, a damn sight less than you have got already, chum”.

It is always possible for some people in society to live a more energy-rich lifestyle. In Victorian times it was done with servants and child labour. In the American South, it was done with slaves. What isn’t possible, however, is for everybody to live an energy-rich lifestyle, unless there is an abundant and cheap source of energy like oil.

So here’s a toast to the myth of our age,

continuous growth

May it live long and prosper, and may humanity have the wisdom to know when it is time to get a new myth. We may be smart enough to do anything, but we are probably not powerful enough to do everything.

Post Retirement Needs & Wants are Hard to Envision in Debt Slavery

Chatting to some colleagues, it seems that many have a hard time envisioning living on less that they currently earn. D’oh, what’s so surprising about that you might say? Well, some of these guys are serious savers. Some of them have kids that are soon to transit from being dependents to adults in their own right, some are already empty nesters.

The point is that many are already living on less than they earn, or their outgoings are about to fall. That’s the only way you get to save

And yet, sometimes discussing how much we’d need after leaving work, their default level is roughly 2/3 of what they currently earn, and few people seem to be able to conceive of living on less.

Now I’m no Jacob of ERE, but here are some of the reasons I will pay less when I stop work than I have done for most of my working life:

No mortgage. For twenty years housing has cost me about the equivalent of five grand in 2010 real terms. No more. Say I spend £1k a year on maintenance. That’s £6k less I need to earn a year (4k difference plus tax and NI)

No need for two cars. With more time I can be flexible, or use taxis, car-sharing systems, hire them if I really must. Saving about £1.5k in all the parasitic costs of owning a car and keeping it on the road. That’s say £2k a year less I have to earn.

No commuting costs. It is easy to end up paying thousands of pounds in commuting costs, and this is not just the cash, but the loss of time every working day. Say another £2k off. This applies less to me because I often bike to work and live closer than most colleagues.

That’s around £10k less that I’d need to earn simply by stopping working. Not having to earn the money to spend on something that’s not fun is always better than having to earn it and buy it. Having one car in the household is a big step up from no car. The second one is only a step up when it covers times where one won’t do.

The mortgage is an anomaly in that is has nothing to do with stopping work. It’s more to do with sucking up 20 years of not spending more than I earn. The house is something I now have, it saves me the need to pay rent, it isn’t inherently work-related.

These are costs saved, but there are other costs that can reduce. With more time, I can do things that previously I’d have had to pay other people to do. On my first house, I replaced the guttering myself. On this one I paid someone to do it because I didn’t have the time, but I could have done it myself and saved money.

All these are steps that move me a little bit out of the money economy. Doing something for yourself is usually cheaper than buying it, because to buy it you have to earn the money and pay tax on it. If I buy £100 worth of spuds from Tesco I have to earn £130 gross to do that. If I grow £100 worth of food from £3 of seeds, I only have to earn £4. I don’t pay tax on value I add myself where I consume it myself – or barter it with others.

There’s a balance here, we don’t have to go all American pioneer and aim for self-sufficiency. As a debt-slave you have to be largely in the money economy. You haven’t got time to to otherwise. As a financially independent individual, you can choose to be less in the money economy – reducing the amount of your effort creamed off as tax.

The money economy can do things for you that you just can’t easily do yourself – I don’t want to keep my own cows and you can’t grow coffee in the UK. You can’t make a PC at home. But let’s face it, you can grow far better tasting veg than money can buy from Tesco, and there are many other things you can do yourself.  If you have the time.

Holidays, a temporary respite from wage-slavery?

Some of the other things colleagues felt were non-negotiable needs were holidays. Some had plans to see all sorts of things on Grand Tours. Obviously they need money for that. Something that has changed over the years is that people pack a lot of expectations into their two week holiday in the sun, almost as if that is a compensation for the grimness of debt slavery. This is almost an addict’s logic – work is awful so I need my break. Needing a break is a symptom, not a solution. Some nutcases even borrow money to buy their holidays, WTF? The summer holiday has almost become totemic – even though some folk even get back to work more stressed than when they were in the office.

Holidays don’t have to be expensive, particularly if you are flexible when you travel. The young usually keep the cost of their holidays down of necessity, and the old do too, both these groups can usually take more time over their travel and aren’t tied to school holidays. Flexibility, and being open to roughing it every so often are the key.

After experiencing Stansted airport in 2007 I came to the conclusion that flying is just not an enjoyable experience for me. The bit in the air is okay, it’s the rest of the package that sucks.  Airports makes me want to kill my fellow humans and yell into their screaming kid’s ears to STFU when they scream into mine. That’s before I have even got off the ground. You get ripped off for the journey to the airport, ripped off to park your car, ripped off to eat or drink anything, hassled by half-wits in security. Why do people pay to do this? Just because the ad says pay £5 to get to the beach doesn’t mean this pain is worth enduring. You get nickel-and-dimed 20 times over in surcharges for the necessities to actually get to use your £5 ticket.

You can pay more to avoid the excesses of the so-called ‘low cost airlines’ but then you find yourself at the whim of striking air traffic controllers/baggage handlers/cabin crew. There are just so many single points of failure in the way of a good experience of air travel. Hopefully increasing fuel prices will drive up the cost of air travel and reduce numbers – I’d much rather fly every third year and have a good experience than twice a year with a rotten experience. About £200 return to Europe air tickets would get numbers down, and hopefully price some of the chavs out of the air too.

I don’t see what the attraction is in paying for this experience, so I haven’t set foot in an airport since then, other than for the occasional work trip. Once my time is my own, I will travel again, but slowly and overland, not in tubular cattle trucks.

So much for holidays. They’re a luxury, not a right, and you don’t get a right to them just because you have a crap job. Modern holidays seem to be almost the anathema of simple living, too. But they’re obviously really really important in some talismanic sense for an awful lot of people, so whoever’s doing the advertising spin must be doing something right.

Power and Heating are the exception

Of course, not everything reduces when you stop working. Heating and power are two obvious areas that will increase. I have hedged some of that with a wood stove and a chain saw and some contacts. Energy costs are a big hazard – my heat and power bill is £800 a year. It is low by UK standards because I have invested in some conservation but mostly because I have aggressively attacked electricity consumption using an Efergy power monitoring system and an appliance meter. That showed me, for instance, that scrapping my fridge-freezer and buying a new one would reach payback in one year, and that where possible I should use my 60W laptop rather than my 210W desktop PC. It is pretty obvious that energy costs are going to go up. You don’t have to be a peak oiler to see that.

Britain has become a net importer of oil in recent years, and the aspiring middle classes of China and India are going to be bidding on the same world energy market as we are. Increasing demand running into a fixed supply usually means a price hike. Observe the effect on the price I have paid per kWh of electricity (the dips in Aug 06 and April 08 are artifacts due to the power company screwing up reading my meter, I have smoothed the curve with a 4-point moving average)

Test Your Retirement Budget While Still Working

It seems obvious to me - test out the retirement budget for a couple of years before you plan to retire, particularly if you aim to do it early. Obviously you still do have the inherent work-related costs like commuting, you can reduce the cost of lunch and coffee by taking a packed lunch, or simply qualify that in the budget too. A fantastic side-effect is that you will probably save more money which you might as well put towards retiring early – in my case some of my savings are going towards paying my way in the years before drawing my pension. If you hate having less money more than you hate working, well, the answer is obvious - work longer, at least you will know why!

I don’t find this, and indeed I am saddened by how little extra quality of life I bought with what was a pretty wanton spending on trinkets and gewgaws. There are some things I bought which I still enjoy and treasure – my Canon SLR lenses for both long bird shots and wide-aperture macro shots. I’ve even sold some pictures. I’ll be pushing up daisies before I get to the break-even point, but it’s fun.  My Hi-Fi – one of the key components bought with six month’s salary saved from my very first job, and most of it over 15 years old.

What runs through the Stuff I treasure and use is that it usually was decent quality, it lasts years, and it has low running costs, and often has been serving me well for years.  It often has multiple uses. I also bought a lot of ephemeral junk too, suckered by consumerism, though at least I didn’t get into debt to buy it.

What I found is that Ivan Illich was right when he said

I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies. (1973, Tools for Conviviality)

Illich spotted that it is usually our relations with others, not what we have, that lends colour to life – conviviality, who matters more than what, once a certain level of needs is met. He was thinking of it more in the design of society rather than the individual case, indeed it is surprising how much of that early 197os thinking has some resonance to now.

Early in one’s working life the focus usually is on Stuff, because you start with nothing. RetiredSyd seems to make a similar observation that you get more bang for your buck on Stuff when you’re younger. What’s notable about some of those early purchases is that they can be in service for a lifetime – my pots and pans, my hifi, for instance. One big piece of Stuff is the house. Common wisdom has it that you should always stretch yourself when buying a house, on the principle that your leveraged asset is not marked to market and house prices always go up in the long run. I would differ – I live in a house which is cheaper than many of my colleagues on comparable earnings, but I also bought my house outright earlier in life than they will, even after some setbacks. Once you own your house, early retirement becomes much more attractive. In normal times, you could just as well get an investment portfolio that underwrites your rent, but there is an atavistic urge that makes owning the physical entity so much more reassuring than glowing figures on the screen, for me anyway.

So it is that there comes to a curious paradox – towards the end of your working life, hopefully when you are at the peak of your earning power, you can find you have less need for money, and stuff it into savings. You can get trapped on the hamster wheel like some of my colleagues, or you can rationally look at your wants and needs, qualify them, and perhaps get a better quality of life. There’s more to life than work.

There is no brighter future ahead

The Archdruid Report considers this a key prognosis, one that goes against the spirit of our times. We expect tomorrow to be better than today, to be better off than our parents’ generation.

His phrase is based largely on what the material world will be like, as a peak-oiler with a view that the basics of life such as food will be scarce. There is a point that previous generations did not have the same expectations that we have of a better future – their better future was often projected into the afterlife. Human beings need hope, even if mythical.

The Archdruid report is trumped in succinctness, however by David Bloom of HSBC’s currency desk.

If we have a US slowdown with a fresh financial crisis, everybody is going to want to buy the Swiss franc, along with bottled water, tin hats, and a shotgun,”

Now how do I go long on tin hats, I wonder Give me CHF now, dammit forget now, yesterday is too late…

Nuts – No NS & I linkers for you lot for the moment

National Savings, they of the horse chestnut logo have decided that they’ve sold enough index linked certificates to the fearful savers of Britain and they’re not doing that any more for a while.

I liked these. The index linking, to RPI, was great. It’s the government you’re lending to, so they will be the last to fall in a run on banks, which is nice. And they’re tax free, so they are a great place to stash some cash to hold it in real terms, almost risk-free. By the time these become risky you will be able to hear the hoofbeats of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and you know you’re going down with ship UK… Presumably this paves the pay for some savings certificates linked to the CPI not the RPI, which as we all know is a true reflection of inflation as real people don’t use fuel or pay housing costs, natch.

The official reason is that NS&I has met its targets for savings this year. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks “yeah, right. What is it that you guys know about forthcoming inflation and government policy that you’re not letting on. As these two guys posted to the Daily Torygraph

The only (risk free) way to protect your savings from inflation being withdrawn. Is this an indication that inflation will rise further still?

Looks like it.

They’re are going to steal everyone’s wealth via inflation, taxes, debt repayments and printing of more funny money. The last train out has just left the station.

[...]

Break out the tin hats and the sick-bags people. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride down. Also screws my plans where I am regularly buying the three-year version every month to give me an RPI-hedged income for three years.