I don’t know enough to judge whether this is scare-mongering or credible. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries claims “New research from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries shows that continuing to ignore resource constraints may have substantial financial, political and social costs“. The report itself and its evidence are contained in these PDFs: PDF: Resource constraints: sharing a finite world – Implications of Limits to Growth for the Actuarial Profession Accompanied by PDF: The evidence and scenarios for the future I found this via New Scientist, which says: “Aled Jones of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues drew . . . . . . . . . . [Read complete post]

This is weeks-old news, but I have written about it elsewhere so I’m posting most of what I wrote here too. Lord Bichard said: “We are now prepared to say to people who are not looking for work, if you don’t look for work you don’t get benefits, so if you are old and you are not contributing in some way or another maybe there is some penalty attached to that.” Obviously there were responses from groups representing older people. For example, Dot Gibson, general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, said: “This amounts to little more than national service . . . . . . . . . . [Read complete post]

The scope of intergenerational fairness and justice is massive. It includes topics such as national debt and the environment and consumption of non-renewable resources. All of these are very important. This article only discusses part of the topic: the transfer of resources (time, money, etc) between generations. Even that is a much bigger topic than can be covered here! This article is intended to set the context for further articles to come, rather than cover any aspect of the topic exhaustively. It simply provides a brief summary of some of the key aspects of the topic. Background to this article . . . . . . . . . . [Read complete post]