Kemi Badenoch appointed new Minister for Women and Equalities

We need distraction to avoid staring down the howling existential void?

Puts me in mind of the zen (ish) exhortation:

'Don't just do something, sit there!'

"Occupation" would be a better fit.

You know those inflammatory headlines in the red top tabloids "The council won't move us and our six kids into a bigger house"? The question the comments always ask (not unreasonably) is "why did you keep having more kids when you've not got the room. In many cases the answer is that childrearing has become the mother's occupation. The father goes out to work (usually fairly low skilled, low paid work) and the mother brings up the kids. As each kid in turn grows older and less dependent, the mother finds herself unoccupied and the solution becomes "let's have another child". Having an occupation keeps the mother happy. A person without an occupation lacks purpose in life and will become unhappy.

For many reasons, it can be argued that endlessly having kids like that is not beneficial to the children - living in an overcrowded home with no privacy is no fun to grow up in. Therefore as a society, we need to look at how the desire for purpose can be satisfied in a different way. Traditionally that has been through the education system leading to fulfilling paid employment - there is a reason why birth rates fall in countries where women have been liberated from the homemaker role. Is there a better way of achieving this aim?

I like Isobel Crawley's approach in Downton Abbey: “If I am to live in this village, I must have an occupation. Please, let me be useful.”

I'd prefer it if growth in GDP per capita was measured, instead of just growth in GDP. The latter just incentivises politicians to grow the population to make the figures look good without improving the lives of citizens.

I don’t think everyone needs a job to be happy.

But I do think communities need jobs to be happier overall - it’s the plural and broad view rather than the individual.

Yes sure, purpose, but I would question that 'job' (to me that implies working for someone else, too) is necessarily that thing. Maybe the word 'job' is causing the issue in my head. If we can expand 'job' to mean vocation or occupation or care or employment I'd feel happier about it.

I'd love recs on good overviews/books of this type of thing.

I don't see that economic growth is necessarily completely tied to social or scientific progress, though? Why can't we maintain a steady economy, while also pursuing scientific research and continuing to refine and adapt and hopefully improve existing laws?

What rate of growth would you like in the U.K.?

Maybe it’s a matter of fluidity of language and meaning. A figure might help.

Also the point about being forced to be more local is a good one. Things are in flux all the time, it’s life. We move forwards, get pulled in another direction, restabilise.. stability sounds pleasant but life is about change.

I’m also pretty sure there’s a direction most people would like to head for - Iran is a good example atm people have access to information on personal devices now and it leads to change

Absolutely this. I do think that stability and sustainability are the better way forward so neither endless growth nor inexorable decline.

Yes!

I also think one of the consequences of covid and Brexit has been to highlight issues with supply chains and our lack of production sector and the problems generally with outsourcing. What we perhaps need to start thinking about is if we 'buy british' and pay more for labour and better quality products it well be perversely cost effective if it means you have people who are less dependant on the state to top up their income and we keep money within our tax system rather than it going elsewhere.

Absolutely this. I do think that stability and sustainability are the better way forward so neither endless growth nor inexorable decline.

I think that relying on what we can do in the the UK, buying British, buying local, paying more if we can for British products made by craftsmen and women would better support our communities and societies and making us less dependent on overseas markets for things which can be produced here would benefit security and stability. It also resolves issues such as ill gotten gains from slave labour or exploitative labour far from our shores.

I do think we need to feel that we are making a valuable contribution to our communities in order to have purpose and fulfilment. That is I think something which has been true for as long as we have existed.

Broadly it tends to get placed as a third way approach along with the Distributists - people like Chesterton, and Belloc. Their claim was that the left and right were mirror images - one took the money of the people for the state elites to control, and the other took the money of the people for business elites to control. In all cases human autonomy and community were compromised.

This is really interesting Mangy, I need to look up more about these people.

Indeed Frys and Caburys are really good historic examples. I don't think you can call them examples of the left either.

If memory serves they come from the Victorian rather conservative values consistent with many of the religious movements of the time such as the Methodists. These promoted the concept of dignity through hard work. The thought was that those given the opportunity to work and willing to work hard were 'morally better' in someway.

These religious movements were typically working class or lower middle class rather than middle class. We see a lot of this attitude still today in slightly different forms - its not a creation of the modern daily mail by any means. But crucially this was supported by the local community.

We see the common theme about the decline of community as part of our wider social problems but little discussion about ways in which we can create it in new ways. This is where the internet fails to provide for human needs and we can't get away from this dilemma. We need to do more to address it.

The victorian idealists who saw workers as an asset rather than a commodity to be exploited.

The philanthropy of the Victorian era where people left public legacies for the betterment of society, don't really exist in the same way in the uk either.

When the Conservatives wanted to push this idea with Big Society what didn't happen was this investment from big businesses or economic elites which would mirrored the past.

Instead it was pushed purely onto the middle class and working class, which ultimately is unsustainable with an aging population.

I also think one of the consequences of covid and Brexit has been to highlight issues with supply chains and our lack of production sector and the problems generally with outsourcing. What we perhaps need to start thinking about is if we 'buy british' and pay more for labour and better quality products it well be perversely cost effective if it means you have people who are less dependant on the state to top up their income and we keep money within our tax system rather than it going elsewhere.

This again, could be seen as right wing and nationalistic, however it has left wing economic benefits which also make sense.

Now I'm massively pro-EU but I think the way our economy has ended up structured has become problematic in the context this and the EU. That does come down to national government failures of planning and long term economic strategy not just the evil EU though.

I think we need to start to see things more as 'counterweighting'. The public interest is served best by balancing competing interests across the board.

Economically and politically.

For that we actually have to talk to an engage with both Labour and the Conservatives rather than encouraging screaming at each other.

Sorry, rambling and increasingly off topic but I'm fed up of threads like this where it is just so pathetically tribal.

Its so fucking self defeating and against our own interests.

To be clearer the jobs to be happy was on community level.

A community without the opportunities to thrive will see many more issues than others. At some point, over 30% unemployment iirc, you’re more likely to see riots and civil unrest.

I’m not drawn into the idea we don’t need growth and it’ll be lovelier. High youth unemployment in particular I’d try to avoid.

We need a purpose in life, certainly. A reason to get up in the morning. A job can provide that purpose. So can raising a family. A lot of people who retire without hobbies to occupy their newly found spare time will struggle to stay healthy.

"Minister for Women" is an acceptable shorthand for "Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Women"

Look where we are though in those centuries - medicine in particular, but also social change which I benefit from as a woman, that striving does have issues but I’ll gladly take this time over earlier centuries, despite those frictions.

Population growth in itself well may reverse. It does bring new problems as ageing population but at least not constant need to share resources around millions more.

So, one thing I would say about growth is that it's historically very abnormal.

It's really only in the late 19th and 20th century that you have these kinds of high levels of economic growth, or that people thought that was important or necessary. Before that the idea was much more steady state.

There are economists now who argue that the growth explosion is an historical aberration and can't be maintained without problems, and that chasing it prevents more stable, healthy models being looked at.

Unfortunatly that kind of change is deep economics and I can't see how any traditional political party could grapple with it in a global economy. It's a collective action problem a lot like climate change. I almost think doing anything about it would depend on nation states withdrawing to some extent from globalism.

Another interesting example, but one which shows some of the ambiguities and problems, is the company Mondragon.

It is a worker owned cooperative model which came out of the early 20th century. At that time there was an explosion of worker based models, another being the Antigonish movement, that grew up around the idea of local groups of workers coming together and pooling resources, you see co-op enterprises, credit unions were central, co-op stores, learning groups and libraries.

It's very difficult to place this movement on the political left or right, as we think about the right now, anyway. They really sprang from the Catholic Social Encyclicals, which supplied a principle they called subsidiarity. This said that any social activity should take place at the lowest level at which is can in fact function. We tend to think of co-ops and such as leftist, but they really werre not looking for the state to swoop in and solve issues that could be tackled at a lower level.

Mondragon was spectacularly successful in the model they built for this - they solved some of the problems many co-op movements found inherent in their own models - and became a major employer in their region, offering things like health care, pensions, and other supports to employees long before political states began to do so.

Now, the end of the story is that Mondragon still exists, but many people feel their model has been impossibly compromised. Largely this restructuring was a response to the pressures of globalism, cheap labour on a global scale was not something they could stand against as they were - largely they were not selling fancy sleeping bags but things like industrial tools etc.

But what I would point out here with regards to this corporation is that you could make a good argument that this was a fundamentally conservative project, not a project of the left.

Broadly it tends to get placed as a third way approach along with the Distributists - people like Chesterton, and Belloc. Their claim was that the left and right were mirror images - one took the money of the people for the state elites to control, and the other took the money of the people for business elites to control. In all cases human autonomy and community were compromised.

This is what I’m responding to

Both Labour and Tories are neoliberal capitalist parties, intent on 'growth'.

Good. I want my dc to work, businesses to thrive, it’s not about sahm which is just a division of labour that families decide on.

So what’s the alternative to ‘growth’?

‘Decline’?

You need someone to earn in your household though right?

On a community level wanting decline is madness even if you don’t personally want to work.

.. talking about ‘growth’ and how they didn’t like it

A woman who stays home is not unemployed but still needs a household income (unless they have their own savings which came from a job etc) - so a partner who relies on growth.

nearly $11 trillion a year.[35][36] This amounts to an enormous subsidy to the capitalist economy, and paying for it would likely render the current system uneconomic, subverting the social relations in the process.'

this is important and obviously of enormous value to society.

Some people need jobs to be happy - I don’t.

I can’t think of anyone in my family/friend/acquaintance circle whose job makes them happy right now. Maybe one at a push!
I’ve been looking at conversion degrees to do something helpful, allied health care professions or social or youth work, but the education and work environments are so toxic due to IDPOL it’s a lot easier not to (especially as the pay in these fields doesn’t acknowledge the stress).

Completely agree re: Labour. Such a disappointment - completely hollow with no real ideas or proposal to make changes beyond tinkering round the edges.

(throwing Lever/Sunlight Soap into the mix of old companies that believed in quality of life for workers - Port Sunlight is a lovely place to live)

But wanting no growth and higher level of people out of work wouldn’t help families make that decision anyway.

Nobody has suggested that. At all.

The previous post was

This still takes an earner and someone to pay for it.

Obviously if a family decides to do that, great. But wanting no growth and higher level of people out of work wouldn’t help families make that decision anyway.