I’m glad Dominic Cummings didn’t get pushed out for something as trivial as a drive to Barnard castle. I’m glad it ended with a realisation that political advisors should never have the power he had, that the civil service can be better but is not broken. I am glad that the politics of division have seen him thrown on the streets.
I know many people want to get rid of opponents by any means, but I believe getting rid of the philosophy behind some people is far more important than the figurehead. To that extent I believe the Biden win may not be a victory. I do not think the American people have had enough exposure to Trumpism to turn them away from the ideology that elected him.
Anyway today I heard an interesting fact that got me thinking about pyramid selling. In case you don’t know, pyramid selling is where your income depends on you selling the product to several others and each of them selling it to several others etc etc – until there are not enough people left and the whole system collapses (in pandemic terms it normally depends on an R rate of about 10 and then collapses when herd immunity kicks in).
Today I heard about our population in 1801 – it was around 9 million. Now there is around 60 million. It struck me that we live in a pyramid society – we depend on more children and more children. Partly this is because of the need for more children as a result of early deaths. So as we change society in terms of child births and life expectancy we are moving away from a pyramid structure.
Does that mean we need to change ow we function as a society? Are the ideas of hard work followed by an easy time still viable? Would we be better with a different system – is this where a universal basic income could come in? Or maybe a jubilee system, where we take “retirement” throughout our working life?