Friday, November 18, 2011

Insight into how OECD operatives think

I have mentioned before that James Bartholomew is writing a new book about welfare. Researching it he recently spent some time at the OECD. His observations about concepts that are currently influencing the thinking in that organisation are not very encouraging:

"As part of the research for my new book, I visited the OECD last week and interviewed eight people there. The concept of low inequality being a ‘good thing’ was referred to explicitly or implicitly a remarkable number of times.... There are certain concepts that were taken for granted as being valid and important at the OECD. In addition to low inequality, there was the idea that women should work because of both economic efficiency and equality with men. The concepts that did not get so much of a look-in were personal freedom, personal responsibility and the idea that families headed by the natural, married parents might be good for the children."

3 comments:

S.Beast said...

Yikes. The faster these idiots learn that inequality is a given, the better it will be for everyone.

If only we had welfare innovation instead of just the regular bashing...

Here is an article titled, "The Future of Work" from one of my favorite sites. We need a forward thinking welfare policy that adapts to the employment environment.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/future-work/64944

At the end of the article (it is in two parts) the question is posed: Where will the demand for work be in a post-debt, post-"cheap oil" economy"?

We need solutions to tomorrow's problems not just getting the numbers on welfare down.

S.Beast said...

Quote "This is not a bump in the road; it is the exhaustion of the entire model of growth that we have depended on for the past 30 years. Once the debt saturation point has been reached, adding more debt subtracts from the economy rather than adds to it. This is reflected in the decline of employment by every metric: total number of jobs, civilian participation, payrolls per capita, and employment as a percentage of the total population.

We are past the point of debt saturation, and so we need a new model of employment, and indeed of “growth” itself."

Bruce S said...

"The concepts that did not get so much of a look-in were personal freedom, personal responsibility and the idea that families headed by the natural, married parents might be good for the children."

I didn't know the OECD was a division of the United Nations. I'll be damned!