The Welfare State and the exponential function

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. (Professor Albert Bartlett)

I do not know that I would agree that unawareness of the exponential function is the greatest shortcoming of the human race, but certainly this unawareness (real or apparent) facilitates legislation which is designed to reduce the advantages of one section of the population while increasing those of another. This may be represented as ‘fair’, but it should not be overlooked that it may produce drastic shifts in the balance of the population quite rapidly.
If an initial quantity A increases by n%, and the result is again increased by n%, and so on, the resulting growth is shown by the graph of
y = A(1 + n/100)^x.
To illustrate how this may apply to groups in the population which are increasing continuously, here are the charts of a hypothetical population group which numbered one million in 1945 (at the onset of the Welfare State) and increased by 1%, 2%, 3% and 4% respectively until the present day, i.e. 66 years later.

Characteristically, the exponential graph remains close to the lower axis at first, but the gradient gradually increases until it is more vertical than horizontal and tends asymptotically to infinity (i.e. it approaches infinity ever more closely and rapidly, but without ever reaching it).
On the timescale being considered, the increase in the population supposed to increase by 4% per annum is already acquiring the characteristically exponential appearance, aiming upwards rather than merely along the lower axis.
The unsophisticated are unlikely to imagine how great the changes may be which ultimately result from relatively small percentage changes in taxation or benefits, which may be applied, initially, only to small populations.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Who cares?

Recent remarks by the Care Services Minister, Paul Burstow, express the warmest goodwill towards unpaid carers who help elderly relatives. But there is something suspicious about this, as about recent expressions of outrage that house owners who go into care homes should be forced to sell their houses to pay their fees, so that their children will be deprived of their inheritance.

We know that, as a population with above-average IQ, pensioners do not attract sympathy, but are scapegoats and whipping boys. So if a Care Services Minister sounds as if he wants to do them good, we must ask ourselves what is his real motivation. It is a case of ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’, ‘I fear the Greeks when they come bearing gifts’, as a Trojan is supposed to have said when he saw the Greeks, enemies of Troy, bringing a wooden horse (the Trojan horse). When taken into Troy as a harmless gift, armed warriors emerged from it in the night.

Now we may suppose that not only are pensioners personae non gratae, but also that those who are most likely to give them unpaid help are likely to be relatives with above-average IQs. So the object of the exercise is certainly to prevent pensioners in need of help from getting any, at least not without falling into the power of the Welfare State and surrendering their liberty. Also, no doubt, there is an intention to prevent the carers from deriving any benefit from exerting themselves on behalf of their relatives. It might, for example, be preventing their relative from impoverishing himself, perhaps selling his house, in order to obtain paid help from the Welfare State or the free market. And the unpaid carers, or other relatives with relatively high IQs, might then inherit more assets than if they had failed to provide for the needs of the relative.

Clearly, no Care Services Minister could want this to happen. So carers must be protected against themselves; they must not be allowed to decide for themselves what has priority in their lives.

And, after all, what is the real underlying motivation? Nothing to do with health and well-being, we may be sure. The object of socialism is to destroy freedom. A pensioner and relatives who are looking after him probably have relatively high IQs and some middle-class or upper-class relatives not too far back. They are sitting on a chunk of assets, maybe more than one house, and investments, and this chunk will not be diminished so long as they do not pay money to outside workers or sell a house to pay for a state care home, etc.

So the assets will pass on to a population also with above-average IQs, their descendants. What can be done about this? The carers might wish to live in hardship for a time for the sake of the long-term rewards. However, they must not be allowed to work harder than other people decree is good for them. (My education was ruined by people who ostensibly wanted to save me from working too hard.)

The NHS will have to 'cooperate with carers'? But surely that can only mean that carers will be forced into meeting doctors (!) and getting their permission for everything they do. The doctors will say what the carers will be allowed to do, and that which is not allowed to be done by them will presumably need to be paid for. With any luck that chunk of assets will crumble to nothing, long before it might be inherited.

The welfare wolves close in

As has been pointed out, pensioners are fair game for anything because they constitute a population with an above-average IQ. At the start of their lives, they are exposed to compulsory education, but at the end of it they are free, with whatever assets they have managed to retain after living for so many decades in the oppressive society. This cannot be allowed.

Britain’s army of unpaid carers are to get new rights to protect their health and wellbeing under plans being considered by the Government.

More than six million people care for loved ones, friends and neighbours but many fail to get the recognition and support they need, say campaigners.

For the first time, plans to reform the social care system, due to be published next spring, will make carers’ needs a priority (Daily Mail, 28 December 2011)

But we know what ‘rights’ and ‘needs’ mean. If you are given a ‘right’, society is given the ‘right’ to force you to have what you have a ‘right’ to.

In the spring, Sainsbury’s will pilot a scheme in 14 of its London stores to identify hidden carers who may need support.

I have already commented on the disgusting idea of having supermarket staff trained to ask ‘unobtrusive’ questions without revealing their motive for doing so. Any supermarket that involves itself in persecution of this kind should be boycotted. I hope Sainsbury’s sales will drop significantly on this piece of news.

The Care Services Minister, Paul Burstow, says disarmingly:

Without the support of relatives and friends, many people who aren’t able to look after themselves would not be able to stay at home.

(Unspoken implication: we will be able to close in on them so much better if it is made illegal for them to get unpaid ‘help’.)

The Care Services Minister continued:

Carers should have their needs looked after as much as the person they are caring for. A carer’s health often suffers because they don’t have time to look after themselves. Some often don’t have time to eat properly. So it’s vital we support them to look after their health and wellbeing.

As ever, any amount of coercion and interference is justifiable because it is assumed that the motives of all agents of the collective are benevolent.

The NHS will have to cooperate with carers, and those being cared for, to ensure their needs are assessed in a bid to make their lives easier.

One proposal is for the rights of carers to be put on a firmer footing so that in social care law they have similar rights to the people they care for.

This could entail pledges to facilitate the wishes of carers who want to stay in employment, while young carers could be given help to stay in education.

Carers must, of course, be given help to enable them to stop caring at all, and to subject themselves to socially approved ways of spending their time, especially of course educational incarceration.

Who wants the NHS taking an interest in their health and well-being? I certainly do not. Why should the NHS be regarded as benevolent? Its motivation is a composite of those who run and work in it. I certainly do not regard the motivation towards me of the man in the street or of the average politician as benevolent; and that of qualified medical sadists is even more likely to be malevolent, since they are willing to work for financial reward in an oppressive and immoral capacity.

What would relieve the stress on carers much more effectively than interference, medical or otherwise, would be to restore pensions to something more like what the pensioners who paid into them for forty years or more might have expected.

Suppose the basic (non-means-tested) state pension were raised from about £5K per annum to about £15K per annum – then every pensioner would have an extra £10K per annum to spend on paid help, delivered meals, etc, which would certainly relieve the burden on many carers, at present unpaid.

If carers are given a right to have their needs assessed, will they also have a right to refuse assessment of their needs?

Lucid dreams, Disney, and a new philosophy department

copy of a letter to a salaried philosopher

I suppose a Philosophy Department would be the most obvious thing for my incipient (squashed and suppressed) independent university to start with. It is incredible that no university anywhere has taken any interest, nor any sufficiently wealthy individual.

On the face of it, a Philosophy Department is cheaper to set up than a Science Department, which makes it less good from our point of view. The larger the scale of the operation, the easier to include a dining hall and kitchens, and live-in staff.

A further shocking reminder of our continued lack of support (not to mention hostility towards us) is provided by the fact that lucid dreams are now part of the popular culture, as well as continuing to provide an area of research for many salaried academics. A recent episode of a popular new Disney cartoon series, evidently expected to reach a wide audience, starts with one of the main characters having some odd experiences, then saying, ‘Oh, this must be one of those lucid dreams.’

I was shocked when I first found that lucid dreams were being taken up by various American academics without the slightest benefit to me, and I have been more amazed the longer lucid dreams have continued to receive attention (of a kind – though not of such a kind as to advance understanding of them, or to provide the slightest opportunity to any of us).

As you know, I worked on them in bad circumstances as the best thing I could find with which to regain entry to a suitable academic career.

I do not think you, or any other senior academic, should find the continuance of our cold-shouldered position acceptable.

David Cameron is proposing to spend about half a billion pounds on advising ‘problem families’, and it is long odds that this will do no good to anyone, in fact it may make things somewhat worse. But that amount of money, although small for setting up a full-scale university with several research departments, would enable me and some other downtrodden people with high IQs to use our abilities to be productive.

NHS budget ‘to rise for ever’

Andrew Lansley last night warned that NHS spending may have to rise for ever, simply to keep pace with rising life expectancy.

The Health Secretary told the Spectator magazine he was not satisfied with managing to get a real-terms rise in health spending for this Parliament – he wanted to see increases in the years beyond. Mr Lansley said the NHS was still immune from cuts, even though other departments were having to cut back on spending.

He added: ‘We have been very clear that the NHS is going to have real terms increases year on year. We have a profile of rising demographics and demand and cost pressures and technology in the NHS.’

Asked whether he believed that spending would have to rise in real terms every year from now ‘until kingdom come’, he said: ‘I believe so.’ (Daily Mail, 14 December 2011)

This is misdirection of attention in order to focus attention and blame on those of pensionable age – a population with above-average IQs. The ‘rising demographics’ referred to – rising expectation of life – may owe something to the increasing number of people who reach pensionable age as a result of NHS expenditure throughout their lives, rather than as a result of their own genetic endowment and prudent life-style. But is the expectation of life not also somewhat reduced by the ever-increasing population of life dependents? Kept alive at considerable expense, the genetically dysfunctional must, statistically, have a below-average expectation of life.
And surely this ever-growing population must contribute far more to the increasing costs of the NHS (and also of ‘education’ and other forms of ‘welfare’) than does the population of pensioners which statistically has an above-average IQ, and is hence the most convenient scapegoat.
On page 23 of the same issue of the Daily Mail there is a report on the case of a girl who has died at 13 after a short lifetime of painful and expensive medical treatments, reduced in her case by her convincing her parents that she would prefer to be free to get what she could out of life without treatment (at least without the most expensive treatment, which kept her in constant pain).
How does the life expectancy of those who never have a normal expectation of life, but are kept alive as victims of the NHS, affect the overall life expectancy figures?

* * *

The state pension system was not originally part of the (oppressive) Welfare State, but mimicked commercial schemes, in which what you paid in was supposed to be what determined what was to be paid out to you at a certain predetermined age, whether or not it provided adequately for your ‘needs’, as determined either by your own aims in life, or by what other people would consider acceptable.
As the costs of the Welfare State, and its growing population of dependents, increased, the state pension was brought under the umbrella of Welfare by being retrospectively means-tested. This brought the population of pensioners, with its above-average IQ, into play as an acceptable scapegoat on whom the rising costs of the NHS etc. could be blamed.
So long as they had commercial-type pensions they were outside the benefits system, and pensions were paid ‘as of right’. That is the reason that I, as a victim of state-funded ’education’, made voluntary contributions for so many years.
Now attention can be focussed on this above-average population as the cause of the rising costs.

* * *

Further misdirection of attention is in asserting that it is not ‘fair’ that those who go into ‘care homes’ should have to sell their houses (if they have them) to pay for the ‘care’ they receive. This, of course, will lead to families being deprived of their inheritance.
Families are said to be ‘betrayed’ by care home funding, which leads to many pensioners being forced to sell their homes. This is described as a ‘scandal’, and it is hoped that a ‘fairer’ system can be devised. This rhetoric in itself should make one aware that a misdirection of attention is involved.
The population of those who reach pensionable age, and have homes to sell, are a population with an above-average IQ; so will their offspring be. So surely the modern mind can see nothing ‘unfair’ in a relatively high-IQ population being deprived of the inheritance it might have had from its parents, also with (statistically) above-average IQs. It is the obtaining of advantages from a previous generation of above-average people which is regarded as unfair, surely? How can ‘fairness’ be increased by transferring assets from one relatively high-IQ population to another?
And so we infer that these expressions of concern that homes will be lost to some of those who might have inherited them must have an ulterior motive. What is presumably aimed at is justification for an additional tax of some kind, resulting in the usual transfer of resources to a relatively low-IQ population.
It is suggested that what a pensioner pays towards his care home fees should be ‘capped’ with ‘the state stepping in’ to pay the rest. That means taxpayers stepping in to pay the rest, including pensioners who do not go into care homes. ‘In a further blow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley refused to rule out a pensioner tax to pay for old age care.’ Aha! This idea – an extra tax on those above retirement age, mooted in the Dilnot Report – approaches more closely the principle of transferring assets from the relatively high to relatively low IQs.
The population of pensioners who do not go into care homes at all may be expected to have higher average IQs than those who do go into them and have homes they might be required to sell, because the former are likely to have better genetic constitutions, have lived more prudently and/or successfully, or because they have devoted relatives, which are all factors likely to be correlated with high IQs.
So it may be seen as ‘fair’ that those pensioners who do not go into care homes should be taxed in order to transfer assets to those who do go into them.
This is no doubt the real reason for blaming the rise in life expectancy of pensioners for the increasing costs of the NHS, so that as usual a population of people with above-average IQs can be penalised for the benefit of a population with below-average IQs.
As for changing demographics, figures for life expectancy are usually quoted in relation to specific ages. E.g. people who are 50 now have a life expectancy of so much. But by the ages one sees quoted, the majority of those with a low life expectancy at birth are likely to have died off, although not before being a considerable drain on the NHS, state education (with ‘special needs’ tutors?), etc. Clearly these are an important part of the real demography, usually left out of the discussion. Those who are still alive at pensionable age (a population with a relatively high average IQ) are certainly not responsible for the rise in the costs of the NHS caused by the genetically dysfunctional (a population with a low average IQ).

Two footnotes

notes on photos of my parents

1. My father missed getting a First by one mark. There was an easy explanation of a shortfall in his marks, but the examiners made no allowance for it, and awarded him second class honours. There was no oral examination for borderline cases at London University in those days, as there was at Oxford and Cambridge.

In fact he had arrived 40 minutes late for the practical exam, to which he had to travel on an unaccustomed Tube route. He was working too hard in the Gas Works to try out the route in advance, and missed a connection on the day of the exam.

2. Classes taught by my mother were getting such good results that she was expected to become a headmistress almost immediately, in spite of some resentful grumbling among other teachers to the effect that she must be ‘pushing’ her pupils.

Photos of my parents

My parents were great people (‘great’ in the old-fashioned sense) who had terrible lives. Like me, they were models of what the modern world most wishes to destroy, having aristocratic genes and high IQs. They were very idealistic, honest and responsible, perhaps too much so for their own good (or for mine). Here are a few photographs which may convey more than is easy to verbalise.

William Alfred Green, aged 15

The first is of my father (William Alfred Green) at the age of 15. He must have left the East Ham Grammar School by then, since the school-leaving age was 14, and his ostensible father did not want to support him for a moment longer than was necessary. So he left school and home, as his ostensible father (an engine-driver) had taken a mistress and did not want to have any children from his former family living at home after their ‘mother’ had died.
My father was the youngest and the only one still living at home. His ‘mother’ (who may have been an aunt) died when my father was 12. From the age of 14 onwards, my father supported himself by working very long hours as a junior (hack) chemist at the Beckton Gas Works, preparing at night school for the equivalent of the exams taken at 16 and 18. He did his homework on the Tube train which he took to get to the night school.
Then, also from night school, he took an Honours degree in chemistry, externally from London University. As he was very tired from his day’s work at the gas works, he found this difficult, in spite of his high IQ, and did not take the degree until he was 24. [1]
He disliked the working-class environment in which he grew up, and felt a strong need to rise in the world. His ‘mother’ was an invalid until she died, so she cannot have contributed much in the way of emotional support.
He read very few books while he was living at home, in fact I do not think he can ever have had time to read many. Nevertheless he came top of the borough in the grammar school scholarship.
He was fortunate to meet my mother (Dorothy Elizabeth Green, née Cleare), when they were both 14, at the East Ham Grammar School. She was precocious and brilliantly maternal, and must have supplied at least some of the deficits which resulted from the insecurities of his early life.

William Green and Dorothy Green (on left)

The second photograph shows them together, in their late teens, on a seaside holiday, or more likely weekend break. They both look older than I was told they were, which sometimes results from high IQs. In my father’s case the discrepancy with his chronological age is particularly marked, which probably results from the hardships of his early life, and from his continuing to work hard in his determination to rise in the world by taking a degree, in the first instance. At the time this photo was taken my mother was probably at the teacher training college, and the third person in the photograph (on the right) was at the college with her. This person later became a teacher at the primary school at the docks of which my father was then headmaster.

William Green at East Ham Grammar School

The third photo shows my father with other teachers at the East Ham Grammar School (middle of back row). He would now have been in his late twenties, having completed his degree but found no prospects open to him. With my mother’s support, he had hastily qualified as a teacher in the last year that this was possible without attending a two-year residential course, as my mother had done.
His hopes of rising to an adequate position in society had, however, been destroyed, and my mother married him when they were both about 24, recognising, I think, his need for support in living out his ruined life. This was damaging to her own prospects of a successful teaching career, although she continued to work as a supply teacher until I was born. [2]

Hitting the high-IQs (as usual)

There are complaints that George Osborne’s ‘Austerity Budget’ fails to provide sufficient protection for ‘the most vulnerable’ sections of the population. Populations regarded as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘deserving of protection’ are highly correlated with ‘populations with the lowest average IQ’.

Confirming that most benefits will rise in line with inflation, Mr Osborne insisted the move was ‘fair and affordable’ and would protect the most vulnerable in society.

The Chancellor is understood to have stuck to plans to uprate benefits after seeing polling which confirms that capping or freezing benefits for the unemployed or other groups – such as the disabled – would be very unpopular. (Daily Mail, 30th November 2011)

Pensioners have always been a useful target for cuts in benefits and increases in taxation as, whatever modifications are made in living circumstances, the population which reaches pensionable age continues to have an average IQ which is higher than that of the population as a whole.

The result of such cuts is that this population will have less money with which to provide support and assistance for its offspring, and reduced assets to leave to them. And, if there is a genetic component to IQ and associated characteristics, reducing the advantages of this population will tend in the direction of reducing the proportion of the population as a whole which has above-average IQs.

Similarly, a population which has its income reduced by the austerity budget is that of those earning over a certain amount (£40,000 p.a. or in some cases £26,000) who will no longer be eligible for child benefit. Those with lower incomes will continue to receive child benefit, in fact it will be increased by the full rate of inflation as measured by the CPI.

Thus those who ‘need’ it most will continue to receive it. Those who have incomes above a certain level will no longer do so, but they are supposed to ‘need’ it less.

It may be noted that this achieves a further shift of resources from a population with a higher average IQ to one with a lower one, and (if there should happen to be an inherited element in IQ) this will, as usual, tend in the direction of discouraging those with above-average IQs from having large, or perhaps any, families.

So the rate at which the proportion of low IQs in the population is rising will once more be increased.

The age at which pensions become payable is of course to increase, and we may expect that it will be progressively increased in the future, thus penalising those who have successfully survived to a certain age (albeit in some cases with expensive assistance from the NHS), and who are therefore likely to constitute a population with above-average IQ.

Mr Osborne insisted the changes were vital as life expectancy continues to increase. He said that standing still was not an option, warning that the cost of paying the state pension is going to become ‘more and more unaffordable.’

What is meant by ‘affordable’? Apparently something cannot be afforded if it can only be paid out of money left over when other, supposedly ‘ring-fenced’ obligations have been met. Does the rise in life expectancy have a great deal to do with the ever-rising costs of the NHS, schools and universities, and other ‘social services’? Every child that is added to the population is an immense potential burden on the taxpaying population; those which are genetically dysfunctional the most.

The cost of the dependent population, which includes those who are dysfunctional by reason of low IQ, is certainly increasing much faster than the cost of supporting pensioners is increasing by reason of a lengthening lifespan.

Once again the (relatively high-IQ) population of pensioners is a convenient scapegoat, and is penalised to offset the massively increasing costs per generation of the dependent population, which on average seems likely to have a lower average IQ than that of the pensioners.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Morals or money?

Melanie Phillips complains of the loss of moral principles in modern society.

Two ... incidents happened recently. A 79-year-old woman has died from head injuries after trying to fight off teenage muggers who robbed her of the bag containing her husband’s ashes.

This attack followed hard on the heels of a story about a teenage burglar who, asked to write a letter of apology to his victims, wrote instead that he wasn’t bothered or sorry at all, and that the burglary was all their fault for leaving their window open.

Such incidents suggest that we are dealing with something beyond merely ruthless acquisitiveness and contempt for the law. They suggest a total absence of empathy for another person, which is the basic requirement of morality and, in turn, of a civilised society. They illustrate a brutalisation of humanity. (Daily Mail, 28 November 2011)

Describing a speech by Phillip Blond (credited as a key architect of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea), she writes:

He [Blond] condemned the doctrine of ‘moral relativism’ according to which no values or way of life can be said to be better than any other.

Melanie Phillips concludes her article thus:

For if we really want to stop Britain’s terrifying drift into brutalisation, where a widow is robbed of her husband’s ashes and the young become strangers to remorse or reason — not to mention the summer’s riots and the economic crash — we surely have to accept that the moral vacuum into which we are staring is one that Britain’s bedrock faith must once again fill.

In 1945, with the onset of the Oppressive State, the link between the individual and reality was broken. Henceforth what determined the well-being or otherwise of yourself and your children would not be whether you could pay for what you and they needed, but whether other people would accept your needs as deserving of support with the money confiscated from other people in taxation.

This achieved a progressive shift in the ownership of resources from the middle class and aristocracy (the elite) to the least functional sections of society.

Nearly 70 years on from 1945, we read of the reduction in the size of families of the middle class, and of the deterioration in the quality of the upbringing which they are able to provide for their offspring. At the same time we read of reduction of benefits available to pensioners, and of unemployed fathers of large numbers of children, many of whom are living on benefits and all of whom, presumably, are receiving an expensive state education.

Attempts may be made to tweak the situation and to ‘kick-start’ the economy by further taxation of the above-average in order to provide ‘help’ for individuals or projects considered socially acceptable, but can such attempts ever work?

Over any considerable period of time it appears to be impossible that policies of this kind could prevent the continuous decline of civilisation. This is because the real causes of the ever-increasing drains on ‘public money’ are never mentioned. Among them is the geometrically increasing cost of supporting the population of those who are not, and never can be, productive members of society (even if interfering in other people’s lives as a doctor, teacher or social worker is considered as a positive contribution to society).

If you do everything possible to multiply the population with the lowest IQs, you will soon have an immense and growing burden on the resources which can be provided by taxpayers.

Oh, but that is only if the factors that influence IQ are at least to some extent hereditary, you may exclaim, and this is something that we find quite unacceptable and will on no account consider.

Nevertheless if, as I strongly suspect, the size of the dysfunctional population, and the expense of providing for it, continues to increase with every generation, it is a matter of indifference how far the factors which lead to this outcome are hereditary or otherwise. This population becomes a burden on the economy which outweighs any efforts which may be made to increase its income by productive activity.

The behavioural standards of a society with this characteristic are likely to decline inexorably towards brutal levels, whatever ostensible morality is being urged on the population.

Brief analyses such as these should be being expanded into research papers. We call on those who recognise the pro-collectivist bias in current academic research to support Oxford Forum.

Letter to a Polish reader

Thank you for writing, and saying

I think Celia Green is one of the great modern British writers – in the perfect world she would be a household name.

It is nice that you get something out of my books, even if I do not get much out of modern British writers.

The reason I have produced so few books, and none of recent years, is that the publication of the books did nothing to relieve the frustration of my position as an exiled academic.

Debarred as I was from any academic career to which I was suited, I needed the books not only to generate income to replace that which I should have had as an academic, but also to build up capital towards the establishment of an independent academic organisation to provide me with living conditions compatible with intellectual productivity.

Unfortunately the books did not in any way generate opportunity. Writing, publishing and distributing them remains a heavy burden on our limited manpower and resources.

We need more people to come and live nearby, to do voluntary or paid part-time or full-time work. This should seem attractive to those approaching retirement, but apparently does not in this country, as nobody of that age group comes.

This is apparently because there is such a taboo in helping anyone who complains of their bad social position and attempts to remedy it. Possibly the taboo is less strong in Poland, where everyone is less cushioned by the welfare state.

Would you be able to come for a short break in Cuddesdon? We are too overworked to spend unlimited time with you, but could meet enough to give you some information about our needs and about the advantages there might be for those working here.

Then perhaps you could tell other people in Poland who might be interested, and this could eventually help us to write more of the books we are currently prevented from writing and publishing by the constriction of our position as well as our lack of academic status.