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Some things shouldn't be measured, or be about any external validation. I'm sure that old lady wasn't doing it for recognition or reward, but just because she f

Some things shouldn't be measured, or be about any external validation. I'm sure that old lady wasn't doing it for recognition or reward, but just because she felt it the right thing to do. A sense of personal or civic pride if you like, or wanting to make her little bit of the world that bit nicer, for everyone. It's something we mostly forgot. Parks and gardens are maintained at lowest, most efficient cost; businesses build the cheapest box building planning laws let them; people couldn't care less about much of anything beyond them and theirs. Everywhere you look things are that much more dull and uninteresting, or messy and rubbish strewn than they once were. I suspect it was an intended consequence of the Thatcher/Reagan years. It's certainly removed a lot of the humanity. I can give no better example of striving to make the world a tiny bit better for no recognition or reward than this story from yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/man-who-tended-mi-amigo-memorial-for-75-years-watches-flypast-wwii-us-pilots https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/man-who-tend... If you click through to the twitter threads that initiated this, you may end up with grit in your eyes. :)

jonbesga 8y ago
Could you explain further what do you mean with one consequence being the Thatcher/Reagan years? Genuinely curious.
- thelasthuman 8y ago
  Maybe the erosion of the safety net and the great disconnect between productivity increases and increases in wages? People who were not independently wealthy are not able to afford to do anything with their time that doesn't earn them money. People are less able to take risks, more apt to settle for less so long as less is stable and safer. There is also a chilling effect on communities as everyone scrambles to "get theirs" when these support systems have their legs kicked out from under them. IMO of course.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Erk, big question! The Reagan/US experience was different in the details, but broadly followed the same road and rationale. I'll cover the UK case as I live here. It's a huge topic, so I've probably summarised this poorly... Thatcherism ushered in a widespread, total belief in materialistic individualism. Until the recession, anyway. Not just the cliched Harry Enfield loadsamoney, or for US readers Gordon Gekko "greed is good" in Wall Street, and the rise of the yuppie, but the abolition of the majority of the post-war consensus. Thatcher herself seemed to have a genuine, but strange, belief that this would turn us all out like the little old lady mentioned in the GP. We'd have massive amounts of civic and social pride, whilst inhabiting a society where everything has been shaped around the individual alone, with competition for everything. Others in government were far more straightforward about the intended result. Anything collective was bad. The welfare state, public housing, public ownership, public amenities were bad, as a matter of dogma. Even when they were good. That included tiny things like the council employing park keepers and gardeners, or big like providing enough public housing. You could buy your public housing, but the local council was not allowed to build a replacement or spend the proceeds on buying a replacement. Post-war, through the seventies, both political parties agreed, and even competed, to provide adequate public housing, public facilities, adequate regulation, an adequate safety net etc. There was plenty wrong with the UK in the 70s, and some of the Thatcher changes were necessary. Just some. Unions were certainly overly powerful. Others, from the long term perspective have been remarkably damaging. It didn't have to be so brutal. It didn't have to go from safety net to now where we have a punitive, vindictive welfare system intended to punish and stigmatise. After 40 years of neoliberal policies to end state control and direction, local government is more centrally funded and controlled than it's ever been. We ended up with individual insurance and pension schemes. Invest in the wrong scheme? Tough shit. The employer was divested of any responsibility to provide for their workers with a collective scheme. Not just pensions, but connections to the community, fair wages, wage differentials, job security. Billions in proceeds from oil or privatisations? Piss them away in tax cuts. Norway built a national investment scheme that's worth hundreds of thousands for each citizen. Collectivism is always bad. As so often is the case, the right answer was somewhere between the two extremes.
  - Ntrails 8y ago
    Defined Benefit pension schemes were a terrible idea that only made sense when you assume the risk free rate will always be 10%. Something more like the Australian model would be good, there are improvements that should be made, but in the end DC is the correct path forwards
- pjc50 8y ago
  Plenty has been written on the subject, but Bowling Alone is the usual introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone It was an explicit policy goal of both Reagan and Thatcher to destroy the power of organised labour, and along the way all sorts of small community activities got swept away. Working mens' clubs, bands, and so on. Providing beautiful flower views for the neighbourhood with no commercial motive is "socialism", or something like that. Of course, it was never directly stated like that, and conservatives continue to occasionally extol voluntarism. But they don't practice it or celebrate its values among themselves. The people celebrated in the post-80s society are those who can take the most, not those who give the most. There's also possibly a gendered component to this; the hidden army of little old ladies and stay-at-home mums who overwhelmingly organise "community" activities. The 80s made it a lot harder to be a non working parent, so the mums went out to work and the children were left with the grandmothers. Let's not forget the famous, defining, Thatcher speech: "I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation"..."There is no such thing as society." -- https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 Given the chaos of the 70s, this argument had a strong point. However, the effect of saying the government no longer had an obligation to house people had the obvious effect: "“Will the Prime Minister accept,” he demanded, “That, 10 years ago, in 1979, there were 2,750 households in temporary accommodation in London; that the current figure is over 25,000 and that a further 2,000 people are sleeping on the streets?" -- Jeremy Corbyn MP, May 8 1990.
  - gjm11 8y ago
    That "over 25,000" figure is about 55k now.
akudha 8y ago
I remember two stories on HN - one about a guy somewhere near NY, who is quietly digitizing tons of old newspapers. It is all available on his website for free. Another about a couple who are collecting seeds, I think. Then there is this man who built a road by himself - https://www.thebetterindia.com/18326/the-man-who-moved-a-mountain-milaap-dashrath-manjhi/ https://www.thebetterindia.com/18326/the-man-who-moved-a-mou...
- hammock 8y ago
  Yet, do these stories and the one above contradict the parent's Narrative around Reagan/Thatcher? They are examples of altruistic individualism- removing the "materialistic" part but not returning the "collectivist" part.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    The difference, of course, is these sorts of things are now exceptional enough to be newsworthy. There will probably always be examples. For my parent's generation it was far more just the usual way of things as so many were involved.
User1020 8y ago
>It's certainly removed a lot of the humanity The reason we measure things is so people can't make assertions like this without some kind of evidence.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Just look into the suicide rates stemming from Universal Credit and PIP, and the sheer number of incorrectly rejected claims. Or the growth of food banks and homelessness.
  - xorfish 8y ago
    Homelessness is declining in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homeless-per-capita-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homeless-per-capita-us
  - ohisthatwhy 8y ago
    and how would we know these rates are a meaninful deviation from whatever is normal, or indeed whatever normal is, if we shouldn’t quantify them?
    - state_less 8y ago
      Numbers aren't the problem per se. We don't tend to have great numbers for matters of the human heart. We can count the number of steps we took in the last day, but how do we count the wellbeing we imparted on those around us?
- state_less 8y ago
  I think NeedMoreTea is pointing to the practice of looking at the numbers and optimizing as much profit as we can out of them, which tends to remove or not account for the human element. It's easy to do a quick glance of the balance sheet and see that the money and hours spent on gardening are a drain on the family budget. A similar thing can happen for government budgets. After all, you don't need flowers to survive, nor do you need many government programs to maintain a country.

jonbesga 8y ago

Could you explain further what do you mean with one consequence being the Thatcher/Reagan years? Genuinely curious.

thelasthuman 8y ago
Maybe the erosion of the safety net and the great disconnect between productivity increases and increases in wages? People who were not independently wealthy are not able to afford to do anything with their time that doesn't earn them money. People are less able to take risks, more apt to settle for less so long as less is stable and safer. There is also a chilling effect on communities as everyone scrambles to "get theirs" when these support systems have their legs kicked out from under them. IMO of course.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Erk, big question! The Reagan/US experience was different in the details, but broadly followed the same road and rationale. I'll cover the UK case as I live here. It's a huge topic, so I've probably summarised this poorly... Thatcherism ushered in a widespread, total belief in materialistic individualism. Until the recession, anyway. Not just the cliched Harry Enfield loadsamoney, or for US readers Gordon Gekko "greed is good" in Wall Street, and the rise of the yuppie, but the abolition of the majority of the post-war consensus. Thatcher herself seemed to have a genuine, but strange, belief that this would turn us all out like the little old lady mentioned in the GP. We'd have massive amounts of civic and social pride, whilst inhabiting a society where everything has been shaped around the individual alone, with competition for everything. Others in government were far more straightforward about the intended result. Anything collective was bad. The welfare state, public housing, public ownership, public amenities were bad, as a matter of dogma. Even when they were good. That included tiny things like the council employing park keepers and gardeners, or big like providing enough public housing. You could buy your public housing, but the local council was not allowed to build a replacement or spend the proceeds on buying a replacement. Post-war, through the seventies, both political parties agreed, and even competed, to provide adequate public housing, public facilities, adequate regulation, an adequate safety net etc. There was plenty wrong with the UK in the 70s, and some of the Thatcher changes were necessary. Just some. Unions were certainly overly powerful. Others, from the long term perspective have been remarkably damaging. It didn't have to be so brutal. It didn't have to go from safety net to now where we have a punitive, vindictive welfare system intended to punish and stigmatise. After 40 years of neoliberal policies to end state control and direction, local government is more centrally funded and controlled than it's ever been. We ended up with individual insurance and pension schemes. Invest in the wrong scheme? Tough shit. The employer was divested of any responsibility to provide for their workers with a collective scheme. Not just pensions, but connections to the community, fair wages, wage differentials, job security. Billions in proceeds from oil or privatisations? Piss them away in tax cuts. Norway built a national investment scheme that's worth hundreds of thousands for each citizen. Collectivism is always bad. As so often is the case, the right answer was somewhere between the two extremes.
- Ntrails 8y ago
  Defined Benefit pension schemes were a terrible idea that only made sense when you assume the risk free rate will always be 10%. Something more like the Australian model would be good, there are improvements that should be made, but in the end DC is the correct path forwards
pjc50 8y ago
Plenty has been written on the subject, but Bowling Alone is the usual introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone It was an explicit policy goal of both Reagan and Thatcher to destroy the power of organised labour, and along the way all sorts of small community activities got swept away. Working mens' clubs, bands, and so on. Providing beautiful flower views for the neighbourhood with no commercial motive is "socialism", or something like that. Of course, it was never directly stated like that, and conservatives continue to occasionally extol voluntarism. But they don't practice it or celebrate its values among themselves. The people celebrated in the post-80s society are those who can take the most, not those who give the most. There's also possibly a gendered component to this; the hidden army of little old ladies and stay-at-home mums who overwhelmingly organise "community" activities. The 80s made it a lot harder to be a non working parent, so the mums went out to work and the children were left with the grandmothers. Let's not forget the famous, defining, Thatcher speech: "I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation"..."There is no such thing as society." -- https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 Given the chaos of the 70s, this argument had a strong point. However, the effect of saying the government no longer had an obligation to house people had the obvious effect: "“Will the Prime Minister accept,” he demanded, “That, 10 years ago, in 1979, there were 2,750 households in temporary accommodation in London; that the current figure is over 25,000 and that a further 2,000 people are sleeping on the streets?" -- Jeremy Corbyn MP, May 8 1990.
- gjm11 8y ago
  That "over 25,000" figure is about 55k now.

akudha 8y ago

I remember two stories on HN - one about a guy somewhere near NY, who is quietly digitizing tons of old newspapers. It is all available on his website for free. Another about a couple who are collecting seeds, I think. Then there is this man who built a road by himself - https://www.thebetterindia.com/18326/the-man-who-moved-a-mountain-milaap-dashrath-manjhi/ https://www.thebetterindia.com/18326/the-man-who-moved-a-mou...

hammock 8y ago
Yet, do these stories and the one above contradict the parent's Narrative around Reagan/Thatcher? They are examples of altruistic individualism- removing the "materialistic" part but not returning the "collectivist" part.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  The difference, of course, is these sorts of things are now exceptional enough to be newsworthy. There will probably always be examples. For my parent's generation it was far more just the usual way of things as so many were involved.

User1020 8y ago

>It's certainly removed a lot of the humanity The reason we measure things is so people can't make assertions like this without some kind of evidence.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Just look into the suicide rates stemming from Universal Credit and PIP, and the sheer number of incorrectly rejected claims. Or the growth of food banks and homelessness.
- xorfish 8y ago
  Homelessness is declining in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homeless-per-capita-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homeless-per-capita-us
- ohisthatwhy 8y ago
  and how would we know these rates are a meaninful deviation from whatever is normal, or indeed whatever normal is, if we shouldn’t quantify them?
  - state_less 8y ago
    Numbers aren't the problem per se. We don't tend to have great numbers for matters of the human heart. We can count the number of steps we took in the last day, but how do we count the wellbeing we imparted on those around us?
state_less 8y ago
I think NeedMoreTea is pointing to the practice of looking at the numbers and optimizing as much profit as we can out of them, which tends to remove or not account for the human element. It's easy to do a quick glance of the balance sheet and see that the money and hours spent on gardening are a drain on the family budget. A similar thing can happen for government budgets. After all, you don't need flowers to survive, nor do you need many government programs to maintain a country.