http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22250584
As usual, I've been inspired by a news story. This one is a little argument over minimum pricing of alcohol. The Scottish government has apparently had inaccurate and biased submissions from the drinks industry, which opposes minimum pricing. This is hardly shocking. What is shocking is that governments continue to trust industry sources' information and opinions when looking into regulation of that industry.
That's not my subject for today. I want to express my revulsion for the concepts behind minimum pricing.
The argument is, as implied in the BBC news article, that low alcohol prices encourage drinking at home. People get hammered on their own, without the social pressure or regulation that they'd experience in a pub. Low alcohol prices supposedly also mean that people buy more alcohol (they have a set alcohol budget and buy as much as they can within that budget).
The correlation of negative effects with low alcohol prices are apparently indisputable, as is the direction of causation.
'Dr McCambridge said: "Our study showed that the alcohol industry, including both
the producers and the big supermarkets, consistently oppose affective approaches
to alcohol polices by misrepresenting strong evidence of what works. There is an
international consensus in the research community that the approach of the
Scottish government is the correct one." '
I suspect it's actually a spelling error, but the use of the word 'affective' is central to my point today. A minimum price may be effective (it has an effect), but it is also an emotional (affective) response that is incompletely thought-through.
I can't comment on the strength of the evidence over whether the harms of alcohol really are greater when it's cheaper. I do know that many alcoholics are relatively wealthy people who will continue to buy alcohol even if the minimum price is a bit higher, regulated by government. I suppose that minimum pricing is intended to hit the binge drinkers who stock up before a big night out.
However, these are not the only people who buy cheap alcohol. I know that binge-drinking is more prevalent amongst young people, but young people are also the ones who are poor and often buy cheap alcohol for moderate drinking; something to go with a meal with friends, or to have one drink whilst watching television in the evenings.
Minimum pricing will reduce these people's quality of life, not increase it. Meals with friends will cost more. Perfectly reasonable consumption will no longer be possible for their low level of income. Why should they be punished for the actions of others?
If we have a playpark that some children are drawing graffiti on, do we start charging an entrance fee? That will help keep away the poor children and the children with mean parents. No doubt children who wish to draw graffiti are mostly poorly supervised and are frequently from poorer backgrounds, and will not pay the entrance fee. So we will have protected the playpark, but at what cost? We will have rendered it a luxury for the rich and excluded legitimate use by poor or neglected children.
If a child in a class misbehaves and the teacher does not see who did it, he can hold the entire class behind. This neatly ensures that he does indeed punish the offender for the misbehaviour. But he also punishes the rest of the class for something that they did not do. This sort of injustice is called collective punishment and at an adult level is regarded as so offensive that it is banned by the Geneva Convention on Human Rights.
It is a fundamental part of law (both English and Continental, I think) that if the perpetrator of a crime cannot be identified or punished then the innocent shall not be punished as collateral damage. This I know because I recently listened to a very interesting discussion on the radio about prosecuting twins, and how they are often acquitted because of the inability to prove which of them comitted a crime.
So why, given this, do we think it perfectly acceptable to punish harmless purchasing of alcohol solely in order to make some alcohol abuse more expensive?
We should punish the offenders. When there is disorder in town centres, arrest and fine the offenders. When there is loud noise in residential areas, fine the offenders. Where a poor person is harmlessly drinking at home, fine the ... oh wait, why should this person pay more? An increase in price is collective punishment of those whose means do not stretch to casually consuming expensive products.
It's saying 'those poor people make all the trouble, so let's make them all pay for it'. It's based on grossly offensive tribal/class thinking, or possibly a simple lack of thought. Either way, it is unacceptable for researchers to recommend it, or for governments to implement it.
I do not care if utility is maximised by punishing the innocent. I do not care if the most solid economic research ever conducted shows that liver disease will be entirely eradicated by punishing the innocent. Economics and social science can show wonderful consequences for their interests (i.e the effect only on anti-social behaviour and alcoholic disease), but the consequences for others must be considered too, and must be given priority. An economist might say that this is an externality of the programme that must be internalised, but it's a specific type of externality. It does not affect just anyone else in society. This externality affects only poor drinkers. These sorts of discriminatory rules should be avoided, as it's impossible to recompense poor drinkers specifically.
This is not limited to minimum alcohol pricing. It's also relevant to the fat tax, which is even more pernicious because fat is healthy and necessary, and it's actually refined sugar that is more unhealthy. No matter which we tax, though, it's over-consumption that is the problem, not any form of consumption. Taxes punish those who do enough exercise to burn off their calories, or those who need the calories to power their exercise. By making exercising more expensive, a fat tax designed to promote health might reduce it, ensuring that the poor can only afford to be in mediocre health, not fit and active as is best.
Apart from a distinct inability to think of the wider consequences and escape the blinkers of thinking that a solution for a problem has no other effects, one cause of these ridiculous proposals is that the NHS must care for all people, but people's choices affect how much care they need. We have a destruction of accountability: we are not holding people accountable for their own health.
We need a safety net. Not all health issues are caused by the individual who suffers them, and a major function of society is to protect people from the mishaps and chance brutality of nature.
But some health problems are caused by the individual, and collective responsibility for such issues is wrong. By making the state pay for these problems, we encourage it to interfere with personal freedom in a bid to reduce its costs.
What we need is for these issues to cost a person money. We could charge people extra money for treatments of alcoholic liver disease and obesity-related heart disease. But we have made it a vital part of the NHS that it is free at the point of delivery (except dentistry, eye care, adult social care, sufficient physiotherapy and prescriptions).
There remains an alternative. We need an insurance system in which people pay for the risks they incur. Heavy drinkers would pay more as they drink, but not for the alcohol which can be consumed in moderation. They would pay for the 'heavy' part of heavy drinking. Obese people would pay for their over-consumption, rather than everyone paying for any form of consumption.
The only place where a tax works is smoking, because there is no safe limit. Smoking is always harmful, and so a tax is appropriate.
But where there are threshold effects, a blanket tax is unfair and disporportionately harms the poor. A minimum price only harms the poor. Neither is acceptable.
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
Friday, 12 April 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-20357131
I came across this truly shocking article some time ago. It's shocking for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's very sad that someone can lose his job over a comment made in a private setting, even if it was visible to others.
His freedom to think and say what he likes should be paramount and I'm glad that the court found that he was in the right. I am a little curious about what legal technicalities might prevent him from recouping the loss of earnings he must surely have had.
What is equally disgusting, however, is the self-righteous tone he takes over his bigotry. Something has indeed poisoned the atmosphere in Britain, and it's people like him who believe that all men are equal, but some are more equal than others. What on earth is equality too far? Is he only in favour of equality a bit, but not when others start getting the privileges to which he's entitled?
I'm also impressed at the euphemism of 'people who believe in traditional marriage' for 'sickening intolerant people'; these people are entitled to believe what they please, but I have no problem with them being outcasts from society if the vast majority of people find their views unacceptable.
It seems that society is a battleground, and this man is fighting to protect his right to be nasty to other people whilst claiming that others making him an outcast is terrible. Hypocrisy is the most terrible thing of all, and he needs to apply some thought to his opinions.
I came across this truly shocking article some time ago. It's shocking for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's very sad that someone can lose his job over a comment made in a private setting, even if it was visible to others.
His freedom to think and say what he likes should be paramount and I'm glad that the court found that he was in the right. I am a little curious about what legal technicalities might prevent him from recouping the loss of earnings he must surely have had.
What is equally disgusting, however, is the self-righteous tone he takes over his bigotry. Something has indeed poisoned the atmosphere in Britain, and it's people like him who believe that all men are equal, but some are more equal than others. What on earth is equality too far? Is he only in favour of equality a bit, but not when others start getting the privileges to which he's entitled?
I'm also impressed at the euphemism of 'people who believe in traditional marriage' for 'sickening intolerant people'; these people are entitled to believe what they please, but I have no problem with them being outcasts from society if the vast majority of people find their views unacceptable.
It seems that society is a battleground, and this man is fighting to protect his right to be nasty to other people whilst claiming that others making him an outcast is terrible. Hypocrisy is the most terrible thing of all, and he needs to apply some thought to his opinions.
I saw today that the legal case brought against Lord Sugar by a winning Apprentice contestant (who by winning the television show was entitled to a well-paid job at Lord Sugar's company) has failed. Lord Sugar has been quite acerbic about it, saying that she is a liar and an opportunist who thought that she could blackmail him for money.
That is clearly what the court, on the whole, thought, although I was surprised to read that his witness evidence included a statement that he'd found her paranoid and suspicious. These two important qualities of people who are familiar with the world seem to me to have no bearing on the truth of the case at hand. This is character assassination and it's sad that it seems, from the news report, to be an important part of the legal system.
However, when we move away from the disputed facts of this one case we'll see that her position is very common. She has argued that she was recruited for a highly-paid job that required a skilled candidate and gave important responsibilities, but that she was instead a grossly overpaid secretary, doing menial labour when she had work to do at all.
This is what any suspicious person would have deduced of a job that was the prize of a gimmicky television show rather than a geniune opening with serious recruitment, but since the court case is over I can't demolish Lord Sugar's argument.
However, I do think that the same general situation applies to many jobs. My own job was preceded by a long recruitment process involving online application, online testing, two assessment days and a number of written tests. After this supposedly stringent selection process the intake of trainees was given secretarial work to do for months until the busy period of the year. For example, someone was asked to shred thousands of pages of documents, which, given the shredder's capacity for only a few pages at a time, took a few hours.
We were told that we were selected for a difficult training scheme, but the initial training was for multiple-choice assessments of rote memory. I will agree that learning stuff by rote is difficult, but I don't think it requires any great talent, as assessed during recruitment.
The training involved some maths, and we were taken over simple calculations that are taught before GCSE (e.g extrapolation and interpolation) as if they were works of genius rather than something any adult could deduce without any training at all.
I wrote at length about the more word-driven parts of the training, and how we were fed 'facts' without being allowed to question them, and required to reproduce them without comment; we were expected to regurgitate definitions in essays even when we had not only used the definition earlier in an exam, but obviously understood it through the context of what came next. Tools were actually lists of things to consider that common sense would make anyone think about, and we were expected to recite these tools (and their names) in preference over making insightful points about the situation being assessed. There's plenty more to write about it, but not here.
Outside of training, we are asked to collect data. We do Google searches and note what we find, and someone senior will do the analysis. I am, at the moment, collecting telephone numbers from websites. A senior analyst will do the data processing we want done; I will be sent off to collect more.
I heard a friend in consultancy say something similar; her work involves following checklists of things to do with the client and some basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel.
I am sure that many people find this, and there's certainly a problem. I would tend to say that we're not being given good enough jobs; that promotion is too slow, but there are other answers. If I, and presumably most of the other trainees in my job, were given training about the job, including doing the job, we would be able to be senior colleagues in half the time.
It rankles to see old men running everything when the expertise needed to run things differs from that (if any) required for the job, and can be quickly acquired. Waiting for 20 years until I'm old enough to have a go at a high-paying, responsible job looks like a form of indentured servitude that people usually condemn.
On the other hand, it could be that the experience of those years really is vital, and the intelligence and aptitude that we've been tested for is actually not important. In this case it seems a bit silly to waste our time on assessments, or even on university education itself (ignoring personal benefits, such as friendships or culture). Since we're supposed to be drones who don't think about how we'd do things ourselves, or question the opinions we're being taught as facts, why bother with a university education that, for the purposes of most graduate recruitment, is good only for transferable skills such as thought and insight?
Given that even people who study business at university get the same treatment as those with merely transferable skills, it doesn't look like this is the answer, although it could be that business studies is such a soft subject that its relevance is balanced by the general quality of the education or candidates.
I'm not sure which answer is correct, but I don't see that it can be neither. Either the complex selection of new graduates is necessary because their rapid learning will make them better workers, faster, in which case they need the opportunity to learn; or there's no need to provide rapid advancement for them because rapid learning won't be good enough: the experience of dealing with multiple situations is the only thing that counts.
At the moment I am, barring the occasional piece of work that goes unnoticed because I solve the problem so quickly, an overpaid secretarial worker. I don't understand how this suits anyone. Because I am doing simple work, I am not getting the training or experience I want. Because I am overpaid for the work I am doing my employer is not getting the efficiency it wants.
I do understand that all work, even at the highest levels, involves a certain amount of relatively unskilled work. No CEO can avoid walking the corridors to meetings, because they do not miraculously appear around him. Everyone must check e-mails and write responses, often relaying information that has already been decided.
However, I'm not going to get the experience I need to get better jobs by doing admin. work for other people. If others do analysis whilst I do data collection for them, how can I get experience of doing analysis (although I have plenty already, as it happens)?
This leads me on to wider questions. Is the population now over-educated for the work our economy gives us? Are we merely vastly inappropriately educated?
The indentured aspect of things enhances inequality; every difficulty anyone faces from a background with no support is a diffculty that someone with a good background can avoid. A rich person who jumps a few levels of the hierarchy by joining Daddy's company escapes the indentured servitude that anyone without such oppotunities seems to need to go through. Once this is accomplished, inevitably that person is more experienced at the best jobs, and no matter how much harder and better-paying jobs overall become, the top jobs will always be occupied by those who had a short-cut to avoid the long way round.
If we want true social mobility in a society which gives people from all backgrounds all opportunities and allows the best performers to get the top jobs, then we need to avoid big hurdles to promotion that the privileged will never experience. We can't artificially create hurdles for rich people only, which would be inefficient even if we could; we need to remove the barriers that affect everyone else.
A major barrier is any sort of investment of time. This applies to generic graduate recruitment jobs as well as research careers. A PhD is not vocational training: it is a price to pay in order to have a chance at a career in academia or other research. What training one does get from a PhD could easily be completed in 6 months if it were distilled down to the training only.
It might be considered greedy of me to want better opportunities to get to positions of responsibility which are well-remunerated. But I think that one of the reasons these posts are so overpaid is the false belief that the people in them are rare and extraordinary people who are not easily replaced. If this is partly because of poor opportunities below them (and partly just hero-worship and good networking/PR) then the lack of supply is entirely correctable.
If we get more people wanting the top jobs and able to do them then wages will inevitably fall, and accountability will increase. If by running a company into the ground you render yourself unemployable because employers can trust plenty of new applicants for the role of running a company, you'll be less likely to do so and get away with it.
So if we were to make promotion faster, we'd pay less money and get better performance. We could even pay less money to the secretarial workers not in training. What's not to like?
That is clearly what the court, on the whole, thought, although I was surprised to read that his witness evidence included a statement that he'd found her paranoid and suspicious. These two important qualities of people who are familiar with the world seem to me to have no bearing on the truth of the case at hand. This is character assassination and it's sad that it seems, from the news report, to be an important part of the legal system.
However, when we move away from the disputed facts of this one case we'll see that her position is very common. She has argued that she was recruited for a highly-paid job that required a skilled candidate and gave important responsibilities, but that she was instead a grossly overpaid secretary, doing menial labour when she had work to do at all.
This is what any suspicious person would have deduced of a job that was the prize of a gimmicky television show rather than a geniune opening with serious recruitment, but since the court case is over I can't demolish Lord Sugar's argument.
However, I do think that the same general situation applies to many jobs. My own job was preceded by a long recruitment process involving online application, online testing, two assessment days and a number of written tests. After this supposedly stringent selection process the intake of trainees was given secretarial work to do for months until the busy period of the year. For example, someone was asked to shred thousands of pages of documents, which, given the shredder's capacity for only a few pages at a time, took a few hours.
We were told that we were selected for a difficult training scheme, but the initial training was for multiple-choice assessments of rote memory. I will agree that learning stuff by rote is difficult, but I don't think it requires any great talent, as assessed during recruitment.
The training involved some maths, and we were taken over simple calculations that are taught before GCSE (e.g extrapolation and interpolation) as if they were works of genius rather than something any adult could deduce without any training at all.
I wrote at length about the more word-driven parts of the training, and how we were fed 'facts' without being allowed to question them, and required to reproduce them without comment; we were expected to regurgitate definitions in essays even when we had not only used the definition earlier in an exam, but obviously understood it through the context of what came next. Tools were actually lists of things to consider that common sense would make anyone think about, and we were expected to recite these tools (and their names) in preference over making insightful points about the situation being assessed. There's plenty more to write about it, but not here.
Outside of training, we are asked to collect data. We do Google searches and note what we find, and someone senior will do the analysis. I am, at the moment, collecting telephone numbers from websites. A senior analyst will do the data processing we want done; I will be sent off to collect more.
I heard a friend in consultancy say something similar; her work involves following checklists of things to do with the client and some basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel.
I am sure that many people find this, and there's certainly a problem. I would tend to say that we're not being given good enough jobs; that promotion is too slow, but there are other answers. If I, and presumably most of the other trainees in my job, were given training about the job, including doing the job, we would be able to be senior colleagues in half the time.
It rankles to see old men running everything when the expertise needed to run things differs from that (if any) required for the job, and can be quickly acquired. Waiting for 20 years until I'm old enough to have a go at a high-paying, responsible job looks like a form of indentured servitude that people usually condemn.
On the other hand, it could be that the experience of those years really is vital, and the intelligence and aptitude that we've been tested for is actually not important. In this case it seems a bit silly to waste our time on assessments, or even on university education itself (ignoring personal benefits, such as friendships or culture). Since we're supposed to be drones who don't think about how we'd do things ourselves, or question the opinions we're being taught as facts, why bother with a university education that, for the purposes of most graduate recruitment, is good only for transferable skills such as thought and insight?
Given that even people who study business at university get the same treatment as those with merely transferable skills, it doesn't look like this is the answer, although it could be that business studies is such a soft subject that its relevance is balanced by the general quality of the education or candidates.
I'm not sure which answer is correct, but I don't see that it can be neither. Either the complex selection of new graduates is necessary because their rapid learning will make them better workers, faster, in which case they need the opportunity to learn; or there's no need to provide rapid advancement for them because rapid learning won't be good enough: the experience of dealing with multiple situations is the only thing that counts.
At the moment I am, barring the occasional piece of work that goes unnoticed because I solve the problem so quickly, an overpaid secretarial worker. I don't understand how this suits anyone. Because I am doing simple work, I am not getting the training or experience I want. Because I am overpaid for the work I am doing my employer is not getting the efficiency it wants.
I do understand that all work, even at the highest levels, involves a certain amount of relatively unskilled work. No CEO can avoid walking the corridors to meetings, because they do not miraculously appear around him. Everyone must check e-mails and write responses, often relaying information that has already been decided.
However, I'm not going to get the experience I need to get better jobs by doing admin. work for other people. If others do analysis whilst I do data collection for them, how can I get experience of doing analysis (although I have plenty already, as it happens)?
This leads me on to wider questions. Is the population now over-educated for the work our economy gives us? Are we merely vastly inappropriately educated?
The indentured aspect of things enhances inequality; every difficulty anyone faces from a background with no support is a diffculty that someone with a good background can avoid. A rich person who jumps a few levels of the hierarchy by joining Daddy's company escapes the indentured servitude that anyone without such oppotunities seems to need to go through. Once this is accomplished, inevitably that person is more experienced at the best jobs, and no matter how much harder and better-paying jobs overall become, the top jobs will always be occupied by those who had a short-cut to avoid the long way round.
If we want true social mobility in a society which gives people from all backgrounds all opportunities and allows the best performers to get the top jobs, then we need to avoid big hurdles to promotion that the privileged will never experience. We can't artificially create hurdles for rich people only, which would be inefficient even if we could; we need to remove the barriers that affect everyone else.
A major barrier is any sort of investment of time. This applies to generic graduate recruitment jobs as well as research careers. A PhD is not vocational training: it is a price to pay in order to have a chance at a career in academia or other research. What training one does get from a PhD could easily be completed in 6 months if it were distilled down to the training only.
It might be considered greedy of me to want better opportunities to get to positions of responsibility which are well-remunerated. But I think that one of the reasons these posts are so overpaid is the false belief that the people in them are rare and extraordinary people who are not easily replaced. If this is partly because of poor opportunities below them (and partly just hero-worship and good networking/PR) then the lack of supply is entirely correctable.
If we get more people wanting the top jobs and able to do them then wages will inevitably fall, and accountability will increase. If by running a company into the ground you render yourself unemployable because employers can trust plenty of new applicants for the role of running a company, you'll be less likely to do so and get away with it.
So if we were to make promotion faster, we'd pay less money and get better performance. We could even pay less money to the secretarial workers not in training. What's not to like?
Wednesday, 20 February 2013
I recently saw this article online:
http://mobile.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/02/abusive_parents_what_do_grown_children_owe_the_mothers_and_fathers_who_made.html
It's a very good article, and got me thinking. A quotation will illustrate the track of my thought:
'The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.
They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.' -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
I am constantly enjoined to forgive my father, along with platitudes that he can't be all bad, and that everyone deserves some care and love. I always thought that this was part people not understanding, and part them reacting to my dislike for him by trying to moderate the opinions they heard.
As the article says, even some good qualities don't redeem a mostly evil person. I also happen to think that the argument doesn't apply to my father, but that's another story (about the sum of many small annoyances).
However, people don't always just take a contrary point of view. I do, myself, a lot of the time: it's part of my questioning nature (I like to think). I think this writer is correct: people say it because they have a general idea that I shouldn't let 'bad' emotions fester. I want to address this concept. If I want to avoid giving nasty people 'power over me', as people often like to call holding grudges, it's best done by not letting them get away with things and weakly rolling over and telling myself it's fine. That sort of self-delusion is not healthy. It's wrong even if I can't do anything about it. Morality doesn't depend on the likelihood of justice actually being done. It's not alright if someone's wronged me: that's an oxymoron. It's wrong if someone's wronged me.
This begins to explain the link between the article on abusive parents and A Brave New World. Every time someone tells me just to make my peace with my father, it rankles: it goes against my very nature. I might have the wrong moral principles (again, another argument) but I do value them highly. Principles are an essential part of who I am. And yet making peace with someone evil is ignoring every moral qualm about them; it's the ultimate act of mercy, but the people who push for it, which seems to be an overwhelming proportion of the population, talk of it as necessary for my well-being. If I try hard enough, perhaps I can dismiss wrongs and injustices and be at peace with a world that inflicts them.
It's this supposed link between my well-being and throwing aside morality that really disturbs me. I've been urged many times effectively to forget my moral concerns and think instead of my mental health. I'm not convinced that paying attentiont to morality is bad for one's health, but even if it is, that's too high a price to pay for a little bit of well-being.
This is a symptom of a wider problem in society: our focus on ourselves at the expense of moral principles. Greed is good, after all, so it must be good to forgive wrong-doers if it helps me. But even ignoring the parallels with capitalism and some of the nastier assumptions/requirements of economics, it shows that a lot of people genuinely value 'adjustment' over morality. It shows that people cannot imagine that I'd have a moral concern about it, and so the appeal to self-interest then makes sense. If all these people urging forgiveness had a notion of justice, or understood that justice takes precedence over self-interest, they'd never suggest such a ludicrous notion as forgetting a lost childhood (or mother) and making friends with the person who caused it.
When society wrongs us, many people become small-minded: they focus on individuals they know who exemplify some sort of unfairness. A recent survey found that the people who will suffer from the recent round of cuts of government benefits all despise each other as being scroungers: people spoke of the people down the road who clearly got too much. None of them cares that it's a load of politicians and bankers who made the cuts necessary (to an extent: it's certainly an argument you'd expect to hear a lot but didn't come up).
That's because we've all learned from a young age to 'forgive and forget', because that's good for us. There's even a revolting prayer I first heard on the lips of an equally revolting (now ex) girlfriend: 'give us the serenity to accept those things we cannot change'. I know that the interpretation of the prayer can vary from person to person, but the general intent seems to me the same. It's saying 'please let me throw away my moral principles and accept whatever injustices are bothering me'.
If well-being is more important than other concerns, a recent study showing that people with attachment anxiety have weaker immune systems suggests that everyone who worries about their partner, gets upset and starts rows, or cares about cheating should just discard their concerns and move on with life. The double-standard here annoys me. I can imagine someone trying to justify it as being about the future, rather than the past, but I don't think that changes anything.
This focus on forgiveness and humility worked well to spread Christianity through the oppressed classes of the world. It makes people easily-dominated and persuades them to accept what they shouldn't. As an individual, if someone really can find that serenity, it might benefit the person's health. But it diminishes him as a person. A respectable human knows right and wrong, cares about morality and isn't a doormat to be trampled. For every act of unearned forgiveness there's an act of unjustified wrongdoing. If we get too deeply into the mindset of forgiveness, we forget what makes us human: our memories, sentience and morality. 'Closure' on my grudges is also closure on my humanity.
I bear grudges because although I know I can't change some things right now, I get my serenity from dreaming of them made right. The past is indeed the past, but we shouldn't forget it. We should learn from it.
http://mobile.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/02/abusive_parents_what_do_grown_children_owe_the_mothers_and_fathers_who_made.html
It's a very good article, and got me thinking. A quotation will illustrate the track of my thought:
'The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.
They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.' -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
I am constantly enjoined to forgive my father, along with platitudes that he can't be all bad, and that everyone deserves some care and love. I always thought that this was part people not understanding, and part them reacting to my dislike for him by trying to moderate the opinions they heard.
As the article says, even some good qualities don't redeem a mostly evil person. I also happen to think that the argument doesn't apply to my father, but that's another story (about the sum of many small annoyances).
However, people don't always just take a contrary point of view. I do, myself, a lot of the time: it's part of my questioning nature (I like to think). I think this writer is correct: people say it because they have a general idea that I shouldn't let 'bad' emotions fester. I want to address this concept. If I want to avoid giving nasty people 'power over me', as people often like to call holding grudges, it's best done by not letting them get away with things and weakly rolling over and telling myself it's fine. That sort of self-delusion is not healthy. It's wrong even if I can't do anything about it. Morality doesn't depend on the likelihood of justice actually being done. It's not alright if someone's wronged me: that's an oxymoron. It's wrong if someone's wronged me.
This begins to explain the link between the article on abusive parents and A Brave New World. Every time someone tells me just to make my peace with my father, it rankles: it goes against my very nature. I might have the wrong moral principles (again, another argument) but I do value them highly. Principles are an essential part of who I am. And yet making peace with someone evil is ignoring every moral qualm about them; it's the ultimate act of mercy, but the people who push for it, which seems to be an overwhelming proportion of the population, talk of it as necessary for my well-being. If I try hard enough, perhaps I can dismiss wrongs and injustices and be at peace with a world that inflicts them.
It's this supposed link between my well-being and throwing aside morality that really disturbs me. I've been urged many times effectively to forget my moral concerns and think instead of my mental health. I'm not convinced that paying attentiont to morality is bad for one's health, but even if it is, that's too high a price to pay for a little bit of well-being.
This is a symptom of a wider problem in society: our focus on ourselves at the expense of moral principles. Greed is good, after all, so it must be good to forgive wrong-doers if it helps me. But even ignoring the parallels with capitalism and some of the nastier assumptions/requirements of economics, it shows that a lot of people genuinely value 'adjustment' over morality. It shows that people cannot imagine that I'd have a moral concern about it, and so the appeal to self-interest then makes sense. If all these people urging forgiveness had a notion of justice, or understood that justice takes precedence over self-interest, they'd never suggest such a ludicrous notion as forgetting a lost childhood (or mother) and making friends with the person who caused it.
When society wrongs us, many people become small-minded: they focus on individuals they know who exemplify some sort of unfairness. A recent survey found that the people who will suffer from the recent round of cuts of government benefits all despise each other as being scroungers: people spoke of the people down the road who clearly got too much. None of them cares that it's a load of politicians and bankers who made the cuts necessary (to an extent: it's certainly an argument you'd expect to hear a lot but didn't come up).
That's because we've all learned from a young age to 'forgive and forget', because that's good for us. There's even a revolting prayer I first heard on the lips of an equally revolting (now ex) girlfriend: 'give us the serenity to accept those things we cannot change'. I know that the interpretation of the prayer can vary from person to person, but the general intent seems to me the same. It's saying 'please let me throw away my moral principles and accept whatever injustices are bothering me'.
If well-being is more important than other concerns, a recent study showing that people with attachment anxiety have weaker immune systems suggests that everyone who worries about their partner, gets upset and starts rows, or cares about cheating should just discard their concerns and move on with life. The double-standard here annoys me. I can imagine someone trying to justify it as being about the future, rather than the past, but I don't think that changes anything.
This focus on forgiveness and humility worked well to spread Christianity through the oppressed classes of the world. It makes people easily-dominated and persuades them to accept what they shouldn't. As an individual, if someone really can find that serenity, it might benefit the person's health. But it diminishes him as a person. A respectable human knows right and wrong, cares about morality and isn't a doormat to be trampled. For every act of unearned forgiveness there's an act of unjustified wrongdoing. If we get too deeply into the mindset of forgiveness, we forget what makes us human: our memories, sentience and morality. 'Closure' on my grudges is also closure on my humanity.
I bear grudges because although I know I can't change some things right now, I get my serenity from dreaming of them made right. The past is indeed the past, but we shouldn't forget it. We should learn from it.
Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Imperfect markets
Markets are typically said to be the best way to distribute our resources. In general, I don't dispute this: I think that some necessities need to be distributed differently, to prevent poor people being priced out of the market, or to ensure coverage, but luxuries and items with plenty of substitutes suit markets well.
However, I do take issue with any suggestion that markets approach perfection, which is often assumed as axiomatic to economic theory. Markets cannot approach perfection. Perfect markets can approach perfection, but that's a tautology: we never deal with perfect markets.
This post is about the efficient market hypothesis, which I was reading about a couple of days ago during remedial GCSE maths (financial reporting work).
Weak efficiency is when prices can no longer be predicted from past movements. If they can be, then people are not acting on that possibility, which means that the price does not accurately reflect information. Prices should follow a 'random walk', in which each future movement is a new event.
Semi-strong efficiency is when prices incorporate all publicly available information.
Strong efficiency is when prices incorporate all information.
If markets are semi-strong efficient, inside information is required to beat the market.
If markets are semi-strong efficient or better, then someone with incomplete knowledge (i.e a human) should trust the market price instead of his own estimate of the price. The problem with this is that the market price is accurate precisely because it is an average of everyone's estimates, and therefore incorporates the information these people know. If one person free-rides on this accuracy, nothing changes, but when it becomes widely accepted that the market is right, information is removed from the estimate, which also becomes much more chaotic as everyone clusters around believing that the 'true' value is very close to the quoted market price, ensuring that small actions can have big effects. This is a double effect of the clustering of people's estimates and the removal of information. It will no doubt be exacerbated by the tendency of those with estimates furthest from the market price to doubt their information the most. Humans have an inbuilt fallacy called 'anchoring' which contributes to this.
Hence, if semi-strong or strong efficiency is accepted, it is rapidly lost by the free-rider problem of people taking advantage of the supposed information conveyed by the price. I have been told that this will be corrected by people who do know what is right taking the opportunity to make a profit, but this assumes that there is one person who knows accurately what the value is: the precise lack of which led to us creating the market in the first place. It also assumes that the market will self-correct. If there is a self-sustaining chaos, or movement away from the 'true' value, then any attempt to use knowledge will fail, being subject to chaos just like random bets.
Given this tendency of markets to degenerate to self-referential prices, there are two ways to beat the market: to use insider information in a semi-strong market, or to be lucky. In fact, if the market becomes self-referential, one can either invest in complex algorithms that predict human behaviour, in an attempt to understand how such self-referential human systems behave, or one can realise that the purpose of the market is no longer being served, and withdraw from it to start again.
Our big banks have, of course, gone for the complicated algorithm option.
So, why do we have hordes of speculators?
The solution would be to prevent the system being self-referential. We want a market that accumulates estimates and averages them, without these being biased by knowing the final result. We need to cut the feedback loop: the contributors to a market need to be blind to the price. That's a problem when the point of a market is to allow them to get a sensible and consistent price.
How else can we avoid the feedback loop that removes information? We can cut it through time, by delaying transactions until after bids, but delays come at a cost, and the next round in a continuous market will be affected by the last round no matter the timing.
In fact, we must tackle speculation itself: the ability to feed round the loop many times. We can't cut the loop perfectly, but if we make transactions cost, then following the loop round will incur a cost that will deter people who are not interested in what the market is for. This cost will hit legitimate users as well. We could also limit derivatives; these specifically refer to market price, and are therefore part of the self-referentiality of the market. Some are necessary, in order to deal with risk, but the freedom to overpower the market with them can disrupt the proper functioning of the market.
I would love to do a cost-benefit analysis of the liquidity added to the market for legitimate use weighed against the cost of greater market imperfection through self-reference. But sadly I don't know enough economics or maths.
However, I do take issue with any suggestion that markets approach perfection, which is often assumed as axiomatic to economic theory. Markets cannot approach perfection. Perfect markets can approach perfection, but that's a tautology: we never deal with perfect markets.
This post is about the efficient market hypothesis, which I was reading about a couple of days ago during remedial GCSE maths (financial reporting work).
Weak efficiency is when prices can no longer be predicted from past movements. If they can be, then people are not acting on that possibility, which means that the price does not accurately reflect information. Prices should follow a 'random walk', in which each future movement is a new event.
Semi-strong efficiency is when prices incorporate all publicly available information.
Strong efficiency is when prices incorporate all information.
If markets are semi-strong efficient, inside information is required to beat the market.
If markets are semi-strong efficient or better, then someone with incomplete knowledge (i.e a human) should trust the market price instead of his own estimate of the price. The problem with this is that the market price is accurate precisely because it is an average of everyone's estimates, and therefore incorporates the information these people know. If one person free-rides on this accuracy, nothing changes, but when it becomes widely accepted that the market is right, information is removed from the estimate, which also becomes much more chaotic as everyone clusters around believing that the 'true' value is very close to the quoted market price, ensuring that small actions can have big effects. This is a double effect of the clustering of people's estimates and the removal of information. It will no doubt be exacerbated by the tendency of those with estimates furthest from the market price to doubt their information the most. Humans have an inbuilt fallacy called 'anchoring' which contributes to this.
Hence, if semi-strong or strong efficiency is accepted, it is rapidly lost by the free-rider problem of people taking advantage of the supposed information conveyed by the price. I have been told that this will be corrected by people who do know what is right taking the opportunity to make a profit, but this assumes that there is one person who knows accurately what the value is: the precise lack of which led to us creating the market in the first place. It also assumes that the market will self-correct. If there is a self-sustaining chaos, or movement away from the 'true' value, then any attempt to use knowledge will fail, being subject to chaos just like random bets.
Given this tendency of markets to degenerate to self-referential prices, there are two ways to beat the market: to use insider information in a semi-strong market, or to be lucky. In fact, if the market becomes self-referential, one can either invest in complex algorithms that predict human behaviour, in an attempt to understand how such self-referential human systems behave, or one can realise that the purpose of the market is no longer being served, and withdraw from it to start again.
Our big banks have, of course, gone for the complicated algorithm option.
So, why do we have hordes of speculators?
The solution would be to prevent the system being self-referential. We want a market that accumulates estimates and averages them, without these being biased by knowing the final result. We need to cut the feedback loop: the contributors to a market need to be blind to the price. That's a problem when the point of a market is to allow them to get a sensible and consistent price.
How else can we avoid the feedback loop that removes information? We can cut it through time, by delaying transactions until after bids, but delays come at a cost, and the next round in a continuous market will be affected by the last round no matter the timing.
In fact, we must tackle speculation itself: the ability to feed round the loop many times. We can't cut the loop perfectly, but if we make transactions cost, then following the loop round will incur a cost that will deter people who are not interested in what the market is for. This cost will hit legitimate users as well. We could also limit derivatives; these specifically refer to market price, and are therefore part of the self-referentiality of the market. Some are necessary, in order to deal with risk, but the freedom to overpower the market with them can disrupt the proper functioning of the market.
I would love to do a cost-benefit analysis of the liquidity added to the market for legitimate use weighed against the cost of greater market imperfection through self-reference. But sadly I don't know enough economics or maths.
Monday, 9 April 2012
Children are special
We're a bit crazy when it comes to children. As a society, our usual morals and concerns are cast aside, along with rationality. I can understand that if we base morality on empathy, and we all care for our children to an extreme extent (because it's a biological imperative), we will decide that children are special.
But I think that's an awful basis for morality, and it leads to some shocking conclusions.
Firstly, if children are special because we empathise with their parents, are orphans not special? Secondly, a person remains the child of his parents after becoming an adult. Should that adult remain special until his parents die, at which point he too loses moral value?
Do we value children because of their innocence? An innocence that has been proven to be a relatively recent societal myth, and can be disproven by talking to any child who was ever bullied at school, who will happily inform you (or unhappily, if the memories are vivid) that children are evil and vicious and need to be taught to behave themselves. I could return to the theme of perceived innocence being more valuable than attained goodness and wax lyrical about that too (just think of all those news stories about converts to a cause whose past actions have been dug up and found not to match the cause: a basic ad hominem argument), but I won't.
We clearly do value children. When presented with theoretical situations involving saving some lives but not others, people aspire to save the children in preference to adults; it's a standard statement to acknowledge the importance of children. And yet why would we value them more? Do we value potential, as we do for the potentiality of a foetus or a sperm? Do we value what is really there: the marriages, the decades of powerful friendships, the network of dependency, including possible other children? We don't even consider the investment made in an adult: the years of love, affection, education, food and energy. No, we ignore everything and value the child.
What about the right to have a child? Do we consider the cost to the world of supporting yet another mouth to feed when the human demand is already greater than it can bear? Do we care about the cost to the taxpayer of more education, healthcare and benefits? The burden on infrastructure that a larger population will create? No, because it is everyone's inalienable right to help destroy the planet. I know that having children is a biological imperative, but come on people! It's an instinct for me to compete to be alpha male and fight with everyone who annoys me or gets in my way, but you know what? This thing called a brain allows me to choose to be civilised.
It doesn't matter if having children is your life's dream, and that the parent-child bond is a special thing. There are plenty of people out there who dream of eating a full meal every day, or earning enough money to buy medical treatment, or, in this country, being fantastically wealthy and famous. There are people who dream of enjoying the 'sacred' bond of a fantastic relationship but are never fulfilled.
Should we declare it an inalienable right to be fantastically wealthy and have a relationship with Keira Knightley? Obviously having children is a bit easier (as every religious extremist who hates abortions laments, wishing people would try abstinence). But it's a strange new moral principle that says that easier things are more moral. It's easy to give in to temptation.
We make much of children as people of worth, and yet at the same time we treat them as pets. I can see a case for either position, but not both together. Parents coddle their children, forbidding them from going out alone, driving them everywhere, doing all the housework and buying them endless gifts. Children are treated like pets: as things to be looked after and spoilt, not taught or brought up. I've chosen those words carefully: spoilt really does contrast with bringing up. Adolescence is an invented part of life that did not exist 150 years ago. Children grew up to be adults, sadly mostly at that time through necessity. We do need to educate people for longer nowadays, but that shouldn't fool us into thinking that children should or must remain childish.
I knew a girl who swore that if she ever had a child she'd make a huge fuss of it, buy it lots of toys and so on. I was shocked (especially as at the time we were seeing each other, and these could well have been my children she was thinking of ruining). Children need to be treated like humans as much as possible, and the essential aspect of human dignity, in my opinion, is to have one's will and independence acknowledged. Given the prevalence of stories of rebellious teenagers asserting their own individuality, I might not be the only one. Thankfully I was spared that need for such teenage antics by having a wise mother who always encouraged independence (although occasionally wished she were able to do otherwise).
It's a strange ideal to have: to love another human and yet to ignore and deny their basic humanity. If I were to talk to any but the most pathetic, romantic woman, none would want to pamper a husband in the same way, despite being encouraged by some parts of our culture to do so. And yet the bond between two (only ever two) partners, despite being regarded as the height of human fulfillment, is very different from the supposedly great and wonderful bond between parent and child.
Even religions agree with me. God, in His wisdom, gives humans the freedom to make their own mistakes and choose their own actions, because human dignity (as I describe it: He probably wouldn't limit it to humans) is a greater gift than anything else. If God is setting the example with His children, surely we might think to try to imitate Him with ours?
I don't think that children deserve special status at all. In so far as they are human, they are of precisely equal moral worth as the rest of us (barring crime). God made us all equal. We are all sentient (I like to think: sometimes I doubt it). But if we don't think that children are responsible individuals; if we think that they get worth as pets and objects of affection of their parents, then they are of less worth than a sentient, free-willed being. They are then comparable with property.
I'd prefer to go for the 'children are independent humans' route as much as possible. But if we want to make children special, then that only serves to denigrate the value of people the world over who I think deserve lives and rights as much.
But I think that's an awful basis for morality, and it leads to some shocking conclusions.
Firstly, if children are special because we empathise with their parents, are orphans not special? Secondly, a person remains the child of his parents after becoming an adult. Should that adult remain special until his parents die, at which point he too loses moral value?
Do we value children because of their innocence? An innocence that has been proven to be a relatively recent societal myth, and can be disproven by talking to any child who was ever bullied at school, who will happily inform you (or unhappily, if the memories are vivid) that children are evil and vicious and need to be taught to behave themselves. I could return to the theme of perceived innocence being more valuable than attained goodness and wax lyrical about that too (just think of all those news stories about converts to a cause whose past actions have been dug up and found not to match the cause: a basic ad hominem argument), but I won't.
We clearly do value children. When presented with theoretical situations involving saving some lives but not others, people aspire to save the children in preference to adults; it's a standard statement to acknowledge the importance of children. And yet why would we value them more? Do we value potential, as we do for the potentiality of a foetus or a sperm? Do we value what is really there: the marriages, the decades of powerful friendships, the network of dependency, including possible other children? We don't even consider the investment made in an adult: the years of love, affection, education, food and energy. No, we ignore everything and value the child.
What about the right to have a child? Do we consider the cost to the world of supporting yet another mouth to feed when the human demand is already greater than it can bear? Do we care about the cost to the taxpayer of more education, healthcare and benefits? The burden on infrastructure that a larger population will create? No, because it is everyone's inalienable right to help destroy the planet. I know that having children is a biological imperative, but come on people! It's an instinct for me to compete to be alpha male and fight with everyone who annoys me or gets in my way, but you know what? This thing called a brain allows me to choose to be civilised.
It doesn't matter if having children is your life's dream, and that the parent-child bond is a special thing. There are plenty of people out there who dream of eating a full meal every day, or earning enough money to buy medical treatment, or, in this country, being fantastically wealthy and famous. There are people who dream of enjoying the 'sacred' bond of a fantastic relationship but are never fulfilled.
Should we declare it an inalienable right to be fantastically wealthy and have a relationship with Keira Knightley? Obviously having children is a bit easier (as every religious extremist who hates abortions laments, wishing people would try abstinence). But it's a strange new moral principle that says that easier things are more moral. It's easy to give in to temptation.
We make much of children as people of worth, and yet at the same time we treat them as pets. I can see a case for either position, but not both together. Parents coddle their children, forbidding them from going out alone, driving them everywhere, doing all the housework and buying them endless gifts. Children are treated like pets: as things to be looked after and spoilt, not taught or brought up. I've chosen those words carefully: spoilt really does contrast with bringing up. Adolescence is an invented part of life that did not exist 150 years ago. Children grew up to be adults, sadly mostly at that time through necessity. We do need to educate people for longer nowadays, but that shouldn't fool us into thinking that children should or must remain childish.
I knew a girl who swore that if she ever had a child she'd make a huge fuss of it, buy it lots of toys and so on. I was shocked (especially as at the time we were seeing each other, and these could well have been my children she was thinking of ruining). Children need to be treated like humans as much as possible, and the essential aspect of human dignity, in my opinion, is to have one's will and independence acknowledged. Given the prevalence of stories of rebellious teenagers asserting their own individuality, I might not be the only one. Thankfully I was spared that need for such teenage antics by having a wise mother who always encouraged independence (although occasionally wished she were able to do otherwise).
It's a strange ideal to have: to love another human and yet to ignore and deny their basic humanity. If I were to talk to any but the most pathetic, romantic woman, none would want to pamper a husband in the same way, despite being encouraged by some parts of our culture to do so. And yet the bond between two (only ever two) partners, despite being regarded as the height of human fulfillment, is very different from the supposedly great and wonderful bond between parent and child.
Even religions agree with me. God, in His wisdom, gives humans the freedom to make their own mistakes and choose their own actions, because human dignity (as I describe it: He probably wouldn't limit it to humans) is a greater gift than anything else. If God is setting the example with His children, surely we might think to try to imitate Him with ours?
I don't think that children deserve special status at all. In so far as they are human, they are of precisely equal moral worth as the rest of us (barring crime). God made us all equal. We are all sentient (I like to think: sometimes I doubt it). But if we don't think that children are responsible individuals; if we think that they get worth as pets and objects of affection of their parents, then they are of less worth than a sentient, free-willed being. They are then comparable with property.
I'd prefer to go for the 'children are independent humans' route as much as possible. But if we want to make children special, then that only serves to denigrate the value of people the world over who I think deserve lives and rights as much.
The joy of Easter
We all know the importance of sleep; it's important for cancer prevention, staying a healthy weight, avoiding depression, ageing more slowly, resisting colds and bugs and thinking clearly.
So it was with some frustration that I have found myself not sleeping so well over the bank holiday weekend and in the previous week. For the preceding week I had been either staying in my little room back in university, or else my flat 'near' work. My little room is lovely, but I need to wake early to get to work, since it's a long journey, and despite the children being off school the traffic was terrible. So I slept badly there because I had to wake early, and because when I know I already haven't a full night to sleep I can't relax as easily: I'm already anticipating the day of struggle ahead.
My other place is a dingy dive, and I am allergic to it. Maybe it's mould, but I snuffle, sneeze and wheeze when spending nights there. Breathing tends to be a good thing as far as relaxing nights of sleep go. But not only is it such a hovel that my body rejects being there, but it is also overlooking a main road, ensuring that the rumble of traffic disturbs me even once I've managed to ignore it enough to get to sleep. The final nail in my coffin is that the window is set to open only a tiny amount. I struggle to understand why you would build a window that can open, but then limit it to open an insufficient amount to let any breeze through.
When it came to the long weekend, then, I was ready to relax in my little room and sleep soundly. The first night I stayed up late and then woke earlyish simply because of habit (and the sunlight pouring round my blind). But on Saturday or Sunday nights I woke part-way through the night to find myself crying. I knew why: I'd been dreaming that my mother was dead. It's a standard nightmare I've had for a long time, but it was hard to get back to sleep because of course now it's also true.
Well, when something nasty like that happens you just live with it. I managed to sleep some more and had other vivid dreams and looked forward to the next night's sleep. So imagine my frustration when I woke early on Tuesday morning after dreaming that my mother and I had decided to do some pottery in the evenings together. I think the sadness when I woke up was even worse than the previous nightmare. It's tough waking up after such a happy thought of chatting to my mother and agreeing to do something fun only to realise that I can never have such moments again.
Easter weekend was tough. I was looking forward to a weekend off work, relaxing and seeing friends. But everyone was away visiting parents; it seems that big holiday periods are the perfect time for a family trip. For those of us lacking that option, the quietness is a subtle but continuous reminder of the sadness that we carry.
So it was with some frustration that I have found myself not sleeping so well over the bank holiday weekend and in the previous week. For the preceding week I had been either staying in my little room back in university, or else my flat 'near' work. My little room is lovely, but I need to wake early to get to work, since it's a long journey, and despite the children being off school the traffic was terrible. So I slept badly there because I had to wake early, and because when I know I already haven't a full night to sleep I can't relax as easily: I'm already anticipating the day of struggle ahead.
My other place is a dingy dive, and I am allergic to it. Maybe it's mould, but I snuffle, sneeze and wheeze when spending nights there. Breathing tends to be a good thing as far as relaxing nights of sleep go. But not only is it such a hovel that my body rejects being there, but it is also overlooking a main road, ensuring that the rumble of traffic disturbs me even once I've managed to ignore it enough to get to sleep. The final nail in my coffin is that the window is set to open only a tiny amount. I struggle to understand why you would build a window that can open, but then limit it to open an insufficient amount to let any breeze through.
When it came to the long weekend, then, I was ready to relax in my little room and sleep soundly. The first night I stayed up late and then woke earlyish simply because of habit (and the sunlight pouring round my blind). But on Saturday or Sunday nights I woke part-way through the night to find myself crying. I knew why: I'd been dreaming that my mother was dead. It's a standard nightmare I've had for a long time, but it was hard to get back to sleep because of course now it's also true.
Well, when something nasty like that happens you just live with it. I managed to sleep some more and had other vivid dreams and looked forward to the next night's sleep. So imagine my frustration when I woke early on Tuesday morning after dreaming that my mother and I had decided to do some pottery in the evenings together. I think the sadness when I woke up was even worse than the previous nightmare. It's tough waking up after such a happy thought of chatting to my mother and agreeing to do something fun only to realise that I can never have such moments again.
Easter weekend was tough. I was looking forward to a weekend off work, relaxing and seeing friends. But everyone was away visiting parents; it seems that big holiday periods are the perfect time for a family trip. For those of us lacking that option, the quietness is a subtle but continuous reminder of the sadness that we carry.
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