Martin Wolf, concerned about our young’s future, praises risk-taking culture. Is this change of mind permanent?

Sir, Martin Wolf writes: “With an ageing population, power is over-concentrated in the hands of the old… The solution is to give parents votes on behalf of minor children.” “Ageing Big Ben’s timely reminder that our political system needs repair” December 23.

In February 2007, in a letter responding to an article in FT by Christopher Caldwell titled “Why the ‘right of the children’ is a juvenile concept”, and based on an Op-Ed I published in Venezuela, I wrote: “If the average life length of a person in UK were 80 and our democracies had anything to do with representation of interests, as in companies, then a new born should have 80 votes, a middle age 56 year old like me 24 votes and someone over eighty should count his blessings if he is allowed to keep his single vote. Of course the previous is clearly just an exaggeration, but it serves to argue in favor of the one-child-one-vote concept, in which the votes of the children are to be exercised by their mother, father or older siblings.”

Wolf, in praise of Big Ben and those responsible for it “George Airy, astronomer royal, [and] Edmund Beckett Denison (later Baron Grimthorpe) also writes: “For an amateur to have won such an important commission tells us much about the risk-taking culture of the high Victorians, as does the innovative nature of his unprecedentedly accurate clock.”

What is this? Martin Wolf suddenly thinking of empowering the young and praising a “risk-taking culture”? I ask because for too long Wolf has refused to support my argument that current risk adverse bank regulations, with their risk weighted capital requirements, has the banks only refinancing the “safer” past and present, and not the “riskier” future our young ones need to be financed, so that they don’t have to stay in their parents’ basements, until these pass away.

Sir, that the U.S. Census Bureau segments population in so many ways to report election results, without including the category of fathers and mothers, is also clear evidence on how underrepresented our young are.

PS. I am not really sure about: “The future of a country managed for the benefit of the past, cannot be not bright.” Is it my English that is lacking, a typo or just a Freudian slip? Per Kurowski

@PerKurowski

Should an 81 years old Scot, have had more right to vote on Scotland independency than a newborn Scot?

Sir, on your first page September 19, we saw the photo of a Jock Robertson, who from how he is dressed is undoubtedly a Scot, and who says: “I have waited all my life for this vote”.

He is 81 years old… and my first though was, I am sure he might deserve to vote, and I am truly happy for him… but, really, should an 81 years old Scot be allowed to vote for on the future of Scotland, when all those under 16, and who will be much longer affected by the outcome cannot?

And it is not that I suggest new born should vote… but I wonder if Jock Robertson, exercising a voting right in the name of perhaps a young grandchild of his, would vote the same as he voted his own vote.

In these baby-boomers’ days and when so many of those 18 to 25 year olds do not seem sufficient interested in elections so as to look up from their I-pads, I have often thought that democracy would be much more dynamic and responsible, if mothers, or fathers, were allowed to vote in the name of their children…

And I say this also because then perhaps we would be able to have governments who do not accept the risk aversion of regulators, and which have banks not financing the future but only refinancing the past.

In 2006 I published an Op-Ed in Venezuela that stated: “Whenever on television we see a desperately poor mother telling how she has been let down again by politicians, it just evidences that her voice and her vote does not count enough.

If that mother, or father, besides speaking in the name of her or his own voting rights, were also speaking on behalf of the votes of their children, her or his voice would carry much more power.

Since it is the young who will benefit, or suffer, for a longer time from what governments’ do or not do, they not only should have a vote but also perhaps have more votes than adults. In some countries, especially those who demographically are in the process of becoming real baby-boomer dictatorships, the lack of representation of youth can have serious consequences.

We see all around us how the short-term interest reigns, we even hear now about accounting in real time, while problems that are perceived as of a more long-term nature, such as protection the environment [and lack of jobs] accumulate everywhere.

To assign a voting right to the newborn, can be the most effective way to remind all other voters that there are also who are interested in what might happen in eighty years time.”

In summary, if the average life is eighty years, a new born should have 80 votes (exercised by his mother or older brother) someone like me would have 16 votes left, and someone over eighty should count his blessings and be glad if he is allowed to keep one as a memento. I do not want to owe the world to my children, I want to assure their rights as stakeholders and make it all more of a joint venture.

http://onechildonevote.blogspot.com

If the incentives are correctly aligned all bonuses make sense.

Sir, John Kay in “When a bonus culture is just a poor joke” April 28, that he would have felt insulted if as a teacher he were to receive a bonus from a student on the successful completion of a course.

Why should he feel that way if the incentives were well aligned? You see it is really not the completion of a course that matters, as Kay seems to believe, but what you do in life with that completion. In this respect let me share with Kay some brief paragraphs I posted on one of my umpteenth blogs a couple of years ago.

Don’t give your teacher an apple; offer him a couple of basis points in your earnings instead.

Parent and students need some way of sorting through the reams of college information in order to make rational investments, but may I remind you that even when finding the absolute perfect college that you might benefit from aligning the incentives better.

In this respect what I am currently recommending my young friends when they take off for their MBA is that they offer a couple of basis points on their first 10 years earnings to those teachers they feel could best advance their careers…it makes wonders! 

Aligning the incentives could in the long run also be the best way of getting information for the picking of a college to, as education should in fact be a joint venture between students, teachers, and colleges.

But in all this slicing and dicing there is no cube with the fathers and mothers of the US

Sir Jurek Martin in “Do not let Limbaugh pick the president” May 8, says “We are slicing and dicing the great American Community as it has never been sliced and diced before. Every component part is in play – black, white, men, women, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, old, young, Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, Jew and non-believer”.

To this we would then also add the slicing and dicing that the US Census Bureau does when reporting on the characteristics of citizens who voted or not in the elections and which, to Jurek Martin’s components adds: Nativity Status (whether born in the US or naturalized), Marital Status, Educational Attainment, Employment Status, Tenure (whether they own or rent the house), Duration of Residence at the place where they now live, Veteran Status and the Region where they originally come from.But surprisingly, at least to me, no one seems to be interested in the cube represented by fathers and mothers! Since the backbone of a nation is its people and the backbone of its people is God and families one has to wonder whether someone is taking the US backbone for granted.

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Odious debt revisited

Sir, I must confess I was blown away when reading your editorial “Young, gifted, poor”, June 9, in which Junior, with reference “to the old saying that rather than inheriting the planet from our ancestors, each generation borrows it from the children” now wants to see “some collateral on the loan”. I mean, it sort of puts the whole issue of “odious debt” in a totally new and frightful light.

Honestly, the more I see what we are up to, the more certain I become that sooner or later our whole generation of baby-boomers could be kindly invited to take a field trip to an “ättestupa”, meaning those steep cliffs where supposedly elderly Scandinavians ages ago threw themselves from when they became useless to society.

I repeat again my argument for an urgent revision of our governmental system so as to align them with the true shareholder’s interest. If the average life is eighty years a new born should have 80 votes (exercised by his mother or older brother) someone like me would have 23 votes left, and someone over eighty should count his blessings and be glad if he is allowed to keep one as a memento. I do not want to owe the world too my children, I want to assure their rights as stakeholders and make it all a joint venture.

The ‛rights of children’ is anything but a juvenile concept.

Sir, if the average life length of a person in UK were 80 and our democracies had anything to do with representation of interests, as in companies, then a new born should have 80 votes, a middle age 56 year old like me 24 votes and someone over eighty should count his blessings if he is allowed to keep his single vote. Of course the previous is clearly just an exaggeration, but it serves to argue in favor of the one-child-one-vote concept, in which the votes of the children are to be exercised by their mother, father or older siblings.

I say this loudly protesting the title of grownup Christopher Caldwell’s “Why the ‛right of the children’ is a juvenile concept”, February 17 and some of it contents, among it his authoritarian conclusion that “Rights over to children will either belong to parents or to the state”.

Sir, with many of our current problems such as the climate change begging for longer perspectives than next quarter’s results, is it not high time that the children, who are the ones who could really have to live in the heat, should have their interests better represented in our societies? Also, the democracies that are now turning into baby-boomer dictatorships, it could truly behoove them to allow their young to have more say, before they all in frustration decide to carry out a coup and thereafter, hopefully politely, show their elders the way to the nearest “ättestupa”, those cliffs from were supposedly the Vikings threw themselves when they became burdens to the society.

How to save ourselves from an ättestupa

Sir, if countries were open-ended investment trusts, then if the average lifespan was eighty years, a newborn baby should have eighty shares, a fifty-six-year-old consultant (like me) should have only twenty-four shares, and anyone over eighty should count his blessings and be happy with the one he’s got left. From this perspective, the representation of the young in our current democracy is null.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, in “How to save the young from the burden of pensions” October 18, describes precisely the conflicts that are getting more serious by the day as the graying of the democracies in Europe (and the US too) is reducing even more the low representation of the younger generations. This though is not a problem restricted to the developed countries. The World Development Report 2007 from the World Bank titled Development and the Next Generation is a truly hair raising reading that evidences our failings as a society and that most of those coming after us are giving up on participation and hope, with damned good reasons.

It is said that in Scandinavia, a long time ago, when the older people felt that they stood in the way of the young, they threw themselves off steep cliffs known as an ättestupa. In this respect Bini Smaghi, instead of talking about saving the young would be more correct phrasing it as saving ourselves, before they throw us down an ättestupa—for damned good reasons!