Once my house was my castle, the bastion of security and stability. The solid core binding the family together and the fortress to repel all invaders or those seeking to undermine our chosen way of life.
No longer.
My house is my fortune. Just an asset to be exploited, a transitory thing with no emotional ties to be dumped when the next opportunity presents itself. No point spending time or effort, investing in the properties future, unless it can be shown to produce an immediate return increase. So quick-fix, eye candy, on trend solutions, never mind getting to the bottom of the rot or decay. Several problems emerge out of this differing attitude. For a start house are not short-lived consumer goods to be re-cycled at the next fashion of technology change. They will outlive us by hundreds of years, we do need to keep them in good shape and relevant to the society of the time. That may require more than a quick immediate return, someone might have to invest in a longer term outcome.
A house is also a home, a home to a family. Family ties are not just those between each member of the family but with the wider community. If we are all doomed to be rootless, migrants, always on the move, never having the time or inclination for other than shallow superficial connections with our neighbours, what sort of sustainable society is that? We have to root ourselves and engage and care about the community that we live within. It is that community that shapes and defines us. It is what makes our family a family, the network of connections to those around us and the environment within which it is set.
So why this urgent need to move on, to move up the property ladder, to get to the next plateau of possibilities? It is fear, the fear of missing out of the ever remorseless spiralling upward of house prices. Fear of being left behind, fear of falling off and not being able to get back on. A fear generated and inflated by all the media, ever harping on about the latest price rises and easy sales to made. But houses are not consumer goods.Their price rise has nothing (or at least very little direct connection to) to do with the cost of land or the floor area or the actual cost of construction. Remember house prices are established by some bloke with a clipboard walking up and down a street, comparing this one to the others and to the prices similar houses have sold for. The price of a house is not its cost, but a reflective valuation of something deemed to be everlasting, someone's guess as to what it might sell for. So long as someone is prepared to pay that price then that is its worth. And why not when we are constantly reassured house prices can only go up. In this present very uncertain economic world where else can you put money that will grow? Houses are the only assured place because their value just goes on going up and up. The bubble just gets bigger and bigger, what is not to lose? Well for one thing, the bubble is so large it has cut off its renewal source. No new players can afford to come into the bottom of the market to sustain the chain. Second thing those player that do manage to join take on debts well beyond a sensible ratio to their income. Thirdly there is a rapidly diminishing pool of punters able to buy at the top end. Fourthly the only thing keeping the bubble growing is confidence, the expectation that the price will rise tomorrow and all the tomorrows.
I cannot think of any clearer indicators that the bubble is poised to burst. All such seemingly unstoppable bubbles have always burst in the past, there is no reason to believe this bubble is going to be any different. The fact that the world economies are dependant on the bubble continuing, their 'growth' coming from the increase in house loans, will not stop it happening despite various governments desperate attempts to shore it up. Their concern at the financial mess it will cause is not sufficient rationale to stop the burst, but just makes it louder and messier. When the inevitable burst comes and we somehow claw out of the ensuing mess perhaps we can once again get back to our house being our home and castle, a place of permanence and security.
Showing posts with label values. Show all posts
Showing posts with label values. Show all posts
Thursday, 16 January 2014
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
What it is worth
We should be daily on guard against our instinctive presumption that what we asked to pay for something equates in anyway to what it is worth. By the time the seller has added on his profit, made allowance for stocking space and expected rate of turnover, the distributor has taken off his slice for double handling, storage waiting for and then transporting, and, assuming there are no middlemen taking a slice before handing on, the prime producer has to cover the advertising, product packaging, verification of standards met, recoup his product design, plant rightoff and premises, insurance against adverse events, stocking levels only then do we get to the nitty gritty, the payroll to produce and the purchase and stocking of the raw materials;finally we get close to the 'value' of the product.
We expect an intimate relationship between what we pay for something and it what it costs in terms of labour and raw materials, yet what is costs actually is ethereal. A figure derived from gut or more probably prior experience of what degree of ancillary costs can be born by the expected market, and still sell and still make a profit. It has a lot closer relationship to the vagaries of house selling, what does the market bear or expect for this size house in this location. Pricing is not hard wired to actual costs but is pitched at market expectations and precedences.
This divorce from the actual cost of things is not just about the products we buy, but as I have explored previously in Government Savings, it is also true of the cost of how we choose to manage and administer ourselves. The 'cost' of government is not a balance sheet figure derived from what it takes to run or administer a set of procedures but reflects a historic norm. This is what has been relied on in the past to produce this end result and that with these adjustments this what it costs us now.
We got here for a sliding progression of perfectly reasonable and at the time right and fully justifiable choices. Right here and now being required to pay what others expect is their due and entitlement just does not seem right. Clearly we cannot go back to barter. Can you imagine the furore at the Supermarket as we all came in with our trade goods to exchange for our weekly shop. Equally we just cannot make and keep contact with the worldwide spread of sources and suppliers to individually barter an exchange for all those everyday items we now so desperately depend. Yet we have to get back to making some connection to what it actually costs, for something, as against what the marketplace thiks it can get away with.
I take heart from EBay. There is a model here, the dutch auction, products are offered at an optimum price then, depending on stock levels, degrees of demand and closeness to spoiling date, the price decreases until the consumers decides that it is worth it. Services might operate in an inverse way, with the rate for the service increasing until some provider snaps it up. Quality is the bug bear, we know only too well how the supermarkets dumb down the specification until it is a pale shadow of its former, introductory, self. With the growth of consumer feedback and instant consumer vitriol when things are wrong, maybe there is is this growing tool that will keep suppliers and providers sharp on their toes. Maybe, just maybe they can claim back from the domineering supermarkets, accountability for the what they provide. That would be the dawn of a new age.
We expect an intimate relationship between what we pay for something and it what it costs in terms of labour and raw materials, yet what is costs actually is ethereal. A figure derived from gut or more probably prior experience of what degree of ancillary costs can be born by the expected market, and still sell and still make a profit. It has a lot closer relationship to the vagaries of house selling, what does the market bear or expect for this size house in this location. Pricing is not hard wired to actual costs but is pitched at market expectations and precedences.
This divorce from the actual cost of things is not just about the products we buy, but as I have explored previously in Government Savings, it is also true of the cost of how we choose to manage and administer ourselves. The 'cost' of government is not a balance sheet figure derived from what it takes to run or administer a set of procedures but reflects a historic norm. This is what has been relied on in the past to produce this end result and that with these adjustments this what it costs us now.
We got here for a sliding progression of perfectly reasonable and at the time right and fully justifiable choices. Right here and now being required to pay what others expect is their due and entitlement just does not seem right. Clearly we cannot go back to barter. Can you imagine the furore at the Supermarket as we all came in with our trade goods to exchange for our weekly shop. Equally we just cannot make and keep contact with the worldwide spread of sources and suppliers to individually barter an exchange for all those everyday items we now so desperately depend. Yet we have to get back to making some connection to what it actually costs, for something, as against what the marketplace thiks it can get away with.
I take heart from EBay. There is a model here, the dutch auction, products are offered at an optimum price then, depending on stock levels, degrees of demand and closeness to spoiling date, the price decreases until the consumers decides that it is worth it. Services might operate in an inverse way, with the rate for the service increasing until some provider snaps it up. Quality is the bug bear, we know only too well how the supermarkets dumb down the specification until it is a pale shadow of its former, introductory, self. With the growth of consumer feedback and instant consumer vitriol when things are wrong, maybe there is is this growing tool that will keep suppliers and providers sharp on their toes. Maybe, just maybe they can claim back from the domineering supermarkets, accountability for the what they provide. That would be the dawn of a new age.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Finding a New Way
On reflection, there are perhaps three major areas of interest in these posts, the community, the political voice and how we value people. I circle around trying to hone in on the core issues but it all changes depending on where you start from and which direction you look in. Bear with me. My current pre-occupation is with how we value people. Looking back at Tax, Salaries & Reward, Raising Revenue, That Extra Mile, even Unemployed, I have touched on several interrelated aspects. Now it is time to dig a little deeper.
There are no absolutes controlling this world. The financial systems we have served their purposes for their time, those systems that worked well, for us, carry us forward. But they are not immutable. They may not even be the best or may have undesirable consequences. That they work is not sufficient reason to stand off and not look at them and ask, is there a better way? We are at the cusp of a new era, IT is changing every parameter of the society we used to know. The future is unmapped, beyond our ken but we do have tools in our hand that we can choose to use to help shift it one way or another. My other posts mentioned at the start gives some indications. Time for another.
The cost of labour. As an accounting unit it is simple to define and therefore simple to totalise, build that into the equation and then calculate your profit or loss. Reduce labour costs, increase profit. Ergo, simple. Except of course life is not simple and the implications and consequences of reducing labour costs are far from simple and have radical society wide impact. Yet if you cannot produce a profit, you cannot continue to produce. Without 'production' there is no call for labour. But life is not simple. We do have to find another way of looking at labour other than just as a cost.
I have touched on it before. Human interactions are best carried out between humans, machine or automated processes just cannot cope with the complexity that a human persons life introduces into the proceedings. Deskilling is a current economic vogue. Break complicated task down into simpler routines, write out the controlling parameters and then teach junior grade staff to perform these simpler routines. Job done and money saved. If only. As an illustration a NHS Staff Nurse when they sit by the bedside of a patient are monitoring the patient for health signs, for verbal indications of well-being and sensory evaluating that all things are in place. Their training but most of all their experience enable them carry out this complex appraisal quickly before passing onto the next patient. Not so the ward assistant charged with serving food, or changing bedclothes, issuing medicines or washing the patient. Simple narrowly focussed tasks that tick the task boxes but misses that experienced overview. How is the Staff Nurse trapped in the office appraising reports of task completed by junior staff ever going to get the time to overview the patient behind these individuals tasks done? The junior staff do not have the training nor experience to understand when something is wrong that can be changed. The boxes are ticked but we are left in a bad place. How does that feel when you complete an automated call process? Wouldn't a voice call to an operator have been faster, more efficient and most of all felt a better experience. Even granting a low calibre operator!
We have to change the way people are valued in the work place. The cost of labour is not the be and end all. Some companies are beginning to respond to this issue, reverting back to human intervention. A "I see what you say" defuses the potential for conflict but unless to drives on to a resolution is only a feel good panacea. The underlying satisfaction surveys have too get a lot smarter. Is not how good we rate the experience but the ease and efficiency by which the problem is resolved that should count. Let us reward problem identification and resolution.
A machine can outperform a tennis player in predetermined shots but can never be a match for the instant anticipation, response and calculated unplayable reply in reaction to a random challenging serve or return. The human mind is fine tuned to compute all those thousands of measurements calculations and positional changes required, unmatched by any foreseeable machine. Let us reward the learnt and adaptable exercise of fine motor controls in novel situations.
We are surrounded and swamped with examples of creative thinking. Machines can be brilliant at producing and searching for viable permutations from selected factors and we are beginning to discover techniques where by 'machine' can learn to optimise a response to a predetermined problem. We humans have been doing it for thousands of years, seeing a problem and coming up with a solution that has no precedent and is not dependant on the starting out position. Lets us reward the outcome of creative thinking.
Today a man was celebrated because his last expression of anger was more than twentyfive years ago, all put down to the benefits of meditation. Whatever route taken some people are able to offer a calming restorative good humoured response to others dealing with life's problems. Lets us reward those that help us back to good humour.
Lets us reward all those intrinsically human attributes that enrich our lives together, based not on the hours of time spent but on the outcomes. Outcomes that contribute to all our better well-beings. Rewards for a job well-done and not for the time spent doing it well or otherwise. Job well-done measured by the human satisfaction with the outcome and not some abstract rule or measure or specification of acceptability. We must relearn how to use humans to their achieve their optimum and then reward them proportionately for those achievements. Let machines do the donkey work they are best suited to. In the end only a human can finally decide whether that fact, trawled from zillions of possibles, is actually relevant to the question in hand.
There are no absolutes controlling this world. The financial systems we have served their purposes for their time, those systems that worked well, for us, carry us forward. But they are not immutable. They may not even be the best or may have undesirable consequences. That they work is not sufficient reason to stand off and not look at them and ask, is there a better way? We are at the cusp of a new era, IT is changing every parameter of the society we used to know. The future is unmapped, beyond our ken but we do have tools in our hand that we can choose to use to help shift it one way or another. My other posts mentioned at the start gives some indications. Time for another.
The cost of labour. As an accounting unit it is simple to define and therefore simple to totalise, build that into the equation and then calculate your profit or loss. Reduce labour costs, increase profit. Ergo, simple. Except of course life is not simple and the implications and consequences of reducing labour costs are far from simple and have radical society wide impact. Yet if you cannot produce a profit, you cannot continue to produce. Without 'production' there is no call for labour. But life is not simple. We do have to find another way of looking at labour other than just as a cost.
I have touched on it before. Human interactions are best carried out between humans, machine or automated processes just cannot cope with the complexity that a human persons life introduces into the proceedings. Deskilling is a current economic vogue. Break complicated task down into simpler routines, write out the controlling parameters and then teach junior grade staff to perform these simpler routines. Job done and money saved. If only. As an illustration a NHS Staff Nurse when they sit by the bedside of a patient are monitoring the patient for health signs, for verbal indications of well-being and sensory evaluating that all things are in place. Their training but most of all their experience enable them carry out this complex appraisal quickly before passing onto the next patient. Not so the ward assistant charged with serving food, or changing bedclothes, issuing medicines or washing the patient. Simple narrowly focussed tasks that tick the task boxes but misses that experienced overview. How is the Staff Nurse trapped in the office appraising reports of task completed by junior staff ever going to get the time to overview the patient behind these individuals tasks done? The junior staff do not have the training nor experience to understand when something is wrong that can be changed. The boxes are ticked but we are left in a bad place. How does that feel when you complete an automated call process? Wouldn't a voice call to an operator have been faster, more efficient and most of all felt a better experience. Even granting a low calibre operator!
We have to change the way people are valued in the work place. The cost of labour is not the be and end all. Some companies are beginning to respond to this issue, reverting back to human intervention. A "I see what you say" defuses the potential for conflict but unless to drives on to a resolution is only a feel good panacea. The underlying satisfaction surveys have too get a lot smarter. Is not how good we rate the experience but the ease and efficiency by which the problem is resolved that should count. Let us reward problem identification and resolution.
A machine can outperform a tennis player in predetermined shots but can never be a match for the instant anticipation, response and calculated unplayable reply in reaction to a random challenging serve or return. The human mind is fine tuned to compute all those thousands of measurements calculations and positional changes required, unmatched by any foreseeable machine. Let us reward the learnt and adaptable exercise of fine motor controls in novel situations.
We are surrounded and swamped with examples of creative thinking. Machines can be brilliant at producing and searching for viable permutations from selected factors and we are beginning to discover techniques where by 'machine' can learn to optimise a response to a predetermined problem. We humans have been doing it for thousands of years, seeing a problem and coming up with a solution that has no precedent and is not dependant on the starting out position. Lets us reward the outcome of creative thinking.
Today a man was celebrated because his last expression of anger was more than twentyfive years ago, all put down to the benefits of meditation. Whatever route taken some people are able to offer a calming restorative good humoured response to others dealing with life's problems. Lets us reward those that help us back to good humour.
Lets us reward all those intrinsically human attributes that enrich our lives together, based not on the hours of time spent but on the outcomes. Outcomes that contribute to all our better well-beings. Rewards for a job well-done and not for the time spent doing it well or otherwise. Job well-done measured by the human satisfaction with the outcome and not some abstract rule or measure or specification of acceptability. We must relearn how to use humans to their achieve their optimum and then reward them proportionately for those achievements. Let machines do the donkey work they are best suited to. In the end only a human can finally decide whether that fact, trawled from zillions of possibles, is actually relevant to the question in hand.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)