For most people, having more money really does promote well-being - just not the privileged few who go to Yale

Who goes to Yale? I'm sure the official answer will be to say 'anybody' and them bombard you with diversity statistics and explanations as to how, despite sky high fees, America's third oldest college is ticky-boo when it comes to who goes there. The truth is that most of the people at the college are the children of wealthy and successful parents (and all of them pretty much are on track to be wealthy and successful).

Which makes what is dubbed "Yale's most popular course" something of a joke - at least to some kid in a mid-west town doing a minimum wage job:

When I asked Santos what she thought of the studies, she replied, “They’re important, but I don’t think they change the message of the class, which is that high wealth has a teeny effect on happiness. The key is that it’s way less than what we predict, and it’s a lot less effective than the other practices we suggest. ”

Practices like meditation, gratitude and making time for social connections have the biggest effect on our well-being, she says, adding that they’re much easier to attain than trying to bump past the $10 million mark.

Yes folks, Yale's most popular course is one telling rich kids not to be too rich (or rather that being more rich wont make you more happy). Note here how the woman running the course - Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology and cognitive science - frames the discussion: "...trying to bump passed the $10 million mark." If you're sat in a dingy flat wondering how you'll raise the cash to pay the rent and keep yourself fed, this course isn't for you now is it!

This is because the premise of the course is that you'll have plenty of money to spend on those things up near the pointy bit of Maslow's famous triangle - all that lovely mindful self-actualisation and what-have-you. For millions of people, this is pretty much a dream - it's not that they haven't got money, more that there's never a point when "can I pay the mortgage" or "I hope something doesn't break this month" aren't at the back of their mind.

There's nothing new in the idea that money can't buy you happiness (although one wag did say that, if you're going to be unhappy it's better to be unhappy with a million dollars). It's also true that, if meditation, gratitude and social engagement are the route to that happiness, being able to afford the time away from trying to keep body and soul together is pretty useful. What Santos is actually saying to wealthy people is 'invest your time on things that aren't about making money' - great advice so long as you've got the money and can free the time.

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Seems I don't own the Royal Mail - but soon might have the chance to...

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Today, something that has been pretty inevitable since the 1980s will take another step towards happening - the government will agree to sell the Royal Mail. This has, perhaps inevitably, been greeted by lots of people (mostly left-wing people) talking about the evil Tories selling off something they "own". Here's a good example:

It's been nice owning a part of the Royal Mail. Pitty, without asking me, they're selling my bit to some rich dude.
— Adam Ramsay (@AdamRamsay) September 12, 2013

There you have it folks! Except I know that I don't own the Royal Mail, not even a little bit of it. Let me explain. I own a bit of Barclays Bank (just a tiny bit that's not worth as much as it once was). And I can sell this and will get a nice cheque, real cash money I can spend. The same goes for my car, the table in the dining room and the wine in the cellar.

But it doesn't go for the Royal Mail. When that's sold I won't see a penny of the value realised, which tells me that I have no stake in the business, I do not own it. The government owns it and the government will get all the money from selling it off (and, in the manner of governments everywhere will probably waste that money).

Once it is sold, I might get a chance of own a little bit of the business. It just might be possible for me to buy some shares, to invest a little bit of my money in the business. That - not some sort of nebulous and collectivist wibble - is what we mean by ownership.

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Transition Towns - or how to be less resilient and exclude the poor

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Maybe I've been asleep - I don't usually miss left-wing, green wibble - but 'transition towns' were a new one on me. Apparently there's a whole movement of them:

Transition Initiatives, community by community, are actively and cooperatively creating happier, fairer and stronger communities, places that work for the people living in them and are far better suited to dealing with the shocks that'll accompany our economic and energy challenges and a climate in chaos.

The point about these 'transition initiatives' is that they involve the capture of a local agenda - and policy-setting within a specific community - by a small group of committed, green extremists. The point and purpose of these groups is to ensure that all the focus within the particular community is on "resilience". We are told the problem is - without evidence or the proffering of choice - with things such as 'runaway' climate change, peak oil and that:

Industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with energy shocks.

The chosen methods for these activists are to stress those parts of the local agenda that are open to criticism on 'environmental' grounds - it might be anything from local concerns about proposals for a coffee shop or a supermarket to campaigns against housing development or new transport infrastructure.

These campaigns give the green extremists the crack into which to ram their anti-development, anti-industrial wedge. At the heart of this extremism is the seemingly benign idea of 'resiliance' - making communities more resistant to shocks such as "fluctuations in energy prices" and "anticipated changes in climate". And this resilience is all about excluding the regional, national and international - thus the lower prices and distribution resilience of the large supermarket is denied in favour of local growing initiatives, jolly little town currencies and campaigns to defend independent shops. All of which, of course, make it more difficult and more expensive for the less well off.

And cutting yourself off from wider distribution systems does not make you more resilient. You only need to look at the aftermath of the recent Hurricane Sandy to see that national retailers were far more able to respond to the crisis than were local independents. Why? Because their national distribution networks, dispersed warehouses and truck fleets allowed them to quickly redirect stocks to places affected by the hurricane.

The truth is that the last and best protection - that resilience - comes from well-managed private business rather than from government. The Transition Towns idea deliberately sets out to exlcude these systems claiming they damage the environment or actually threaten local resilience. Worse still Transition Towns seek to create local systems that are more expensive to manage, less robust and excluding of the poor - they are not just twee little groups 'doing good' but organisations actively damaging communities.

Most depressingly these Transition Towns do not seem that way. Clever and articulate people promote them, the same naive churchy types as were suckered by 'fair trade' get involved and none of these people realise that the losers in all this are the poor. The one's who'd rather like a nice supermarket or a Costa coffee. The one's who would benefit most from connection to the international network of trade. The one's who'd like their sons and daughters to have a fighting chance of affording to carry on living in the smart little market town. The people who benefit from that "industrial society" our Transition Town advocates disdain.

Transition Towns really are less resilient and exclude the poor.

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Local Councils increase reserves (what was that about cuts?)

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The LGA is weeping crocodile tears about Council's using reserves to manage the process of budget reductions (we should really call it 'rebasing' but that is rather too much of a jargon term for little old me). Apparently prudent local councils (who have stashed away £17 billion for a range of rainy days) will run out of money if the "cuts" continue:

...the LGA has said that the £17bn saved in cash reserves by the most prudent authorities will be used up in five years time if employed for the management of Government austerity measures. 

Of course a council may choose to use some of its reserves to extend the period over which the budget is reduced from its current base to a new base. This allows for fewer redundancies, gives space for effective service redesign and allows for the impact of any service reductions to be ameliorated. It is - in a period of savings - good budget management. Which explains of course why Bradford's Labour leadership has chosen to keep the reserves and cut the services. I call it the machismo of cuts.

But the LGA then comes up with a whining little reason why Council's shouldn't spend reserves:

This will leave councils without funds to invest in growth promoting infrastructure projects or support any further financial risks...

Pretty scary! Especially when we see the actual situation - what has really happened to reserves during this period of massive budget cuts:

Over last year, town halls outside of the capital were found to have added £2bn to their reserves, while authorities within the Greater London Authority furthered their reserves by £0.6bn. 

So it seems that, during a period of severe budget cuts, local councils have managed to squirrel away yet more cash for ill-defined and often unspecified future purposes - "strategic revenue reserves" and "change programme funds" abound providing senior officers and politicians with handy little slush funds to bung at preferred schemes and vote-buying campaigns. 

But the boss of the LGA - a Tory for heaven's sake - still bleats on about how this is all terrible:

'Councils are working extremely hard to shield frontline services from the 28% cut to the money they receive from Government. But cash reserves can only dampen the impact, not fill the gap. If councils plundered their reserves to cover the cuts, the cupboard would be bare within five years and there would be nothing left to invest in the growth promoting projects Britain desperately needs.’

So tell me Cllr Cockell, why aren't councils investing in these 'growth promoting projects' now? Why are councils continuing to hoard cash - Bradford has over £170 million, Manchester getting on for £250 million - against some proverbial rainy day? What are revenue reserves for if it's not to allow effective restructuring and the proper management of a reducing budget?

This is just special pleading - I would say ignorance but I simply don't believe that the leadership of the LGA are ignorant. This is deliberate wibble, an attempt to wangle a little more cash out of the government this autumn. That is all.

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The problem that isn't a problem - alcohol in Bradford

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It seems that (according to the very latest statistics) Bradford doesn't have much of a problem with alcohol:

Local Alcohol Profiles for England provides data for a total of 326 local authority areas, across 24 health, crime and prevalence indicators, and ranks them in order of performance with one being the best and 326 the worst.

Data for the Bradford district places it 18th out of 326 for the number of abstainers and 27th for the percentage of higher-risk* drinkers – both in the top ten per cent in the country.

The number of binge drinkers, alcohol-specific hospital admissions for under-18s and alcohol-related crime are all also lower than average.

*Pretty sure this should read 'lower-risk' btw

So drinking isn't a major problem for the city so perhaps the public health folk will prioritise other public health problems? Seems not:

Despite a higher-than-average number of abstainers and low-risk drinkers, alcohol misuse continues to cause harm, especially to the health of people in the district and remains a priority for action...

And we get the usual gibbering nonsense - this time from Andrew O'Shaunessey, Bradford's top public health doctor about 'hazardous' (ie drinking more that two pints of lager on any given evening in a week) and 'harmful' (doing that on three nights in any given week).

When will these folk shut up?

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