Social engineering and the Thought Police

The following is an extract from an article by Professor Max Hammerton* entitled ‘The Thought Police’ in a recent issue of the Oxford Magazine, which mildly endorses the idea that heritability of intelligence undermines demands that there should be more representation among university students from outside the middle class.

David Hume, the greatest philosopher of modern times, rightly pointed out that no ‘ought’ statement can validly be deduced from any ‘is’ statement. However, if you accept some ‘ought’, an ‘is’ may tell you how some action, or want of action, may help or hinder its achievement. Now I trust that you will agree with this ‘ought’: that ability to profit from a course of study should be the only criterion for a person’s being selected for that course. If it should appear that factors other than ability are influencing the outcome then there is a case for altering the selection procedures used. (Oxford Magazine, No.325, p.7)

I certainly do not agree with Hammerton that the ‘ability to profit from a course of study should be the only criterion for a person’s being selected for that course.’

This implies a context within which a ‘course of study’ is a necessary prerequisite for obtaining a qualification and is not devised and paid for by the person seeking the qualification, or by his representative (parents, etc.). The ‘course of study’ is an obstacle race devised by people who have been given their positions by other people, all the way back to a democratically elected government, the members of which are motivated to win approval from the population at large. The ‘course of study’ devised in this way cannot even be freely bought by anyone who has sufficient money to do so. It is bestowed upon those who are selected to receive it by agents of the collective who are empowered to do so.

When the Oppressive State was introduced in 1945, people, including those with above-average IQs, rejoiced that they would receive, under the names of ‘education’ and ‘medicine’, goods which corresponded to things for which they might previously have wished to pay.

However, ‘courses of study’ for which you have not paid directly cannot be presumed to be a positive factor in any sense. They are certainly likely to be less positive than those for which you might have paid, as indeed is generally supposed to be the case in comparing state-funded ‘education’ with private education (with the consequence that those who have not been exposed to state schools ‘should’ be discriminated against). Or the unpaid-for version may be so destructive in every respect that you would be far better off without it.

‘Caveat emptor’ does not apply, because you are not paying for what you get.

Those who run a person’s ‘free’ education may act on any combination of ideological rationalisation and personal malice. As Hammerton says, ‘it is now a generally adopted act of faith that group differences simply do not exist, and any hint that they may is to be suppressed by the Thought Police.’

It is not only an act of faith, but expert dogma, that differences between individuals are predominantly the result of environmental influences.

Therefore, we may plausibly assume, agents of the collective are strongly motivated to make their beliefs appear true, and will stop at nothing to ruin the lives of those with exceptional ability, who might otherwise give the naive observer grounds for wondering whether ability is not, in fact, largely innate.

A recent Daily Mail quotes someone as admitting that the middle classes (in other words, those with higher average IQs) are being discriminated against. Actually, in my experience, high IQs have been discriminated against throughout my lifetime (from the age of 10 onwards, when I was first exposed to state-funded education).

Mary Curnock Cook raised a series of concerns over the so-called social engineering of university admissions. Under the policy, universities are expected to make background checks on applicants and use the information to reduce entry grades for poorer students. But Mrs Curnock Cook, chief executive of UCAS, warned that ‘somebody has to lose out’ unless the total number of university places increases ...

The UCAS chief went on to admit she had ‘real concerns’ over the quality of official data on pupils’ backgrounds supplied to universities. The system could result in discrimination against deprived pupils who received bursaries to go to private schools while giving an advantage to wealthy pupils at under-achieving schools, she suggested ...

Her remarks to a conference came on the day Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg launched a major social mobility drive aimed at breaking the grip of middle-class families on top jobs and sought-after universities. (Daily Mail, 1 June 2012)

Of course somebody has to lose out, and it will obviously be offspring of the middle class, i.e. those statistically likely to have higher IQs.

Expressing concerns over whether the discrimination urged on universities may not work exactly in the directions intended merely diverts attention away from the more serious flaw in the whole programme of admissions engineering: that there is no reason why discriminating in favour of some relatively excluded social group is going to result in more, rather than less, weight being given to innate ability. The issue of heritability is simply ignored. One may well conclude that the programme is essentially an effective part of the strategy for discriminating against ability.

* Professor Emeritus in Psychology at Newcastle University. Head of Department 1973-92.

Barking up the wrong tree

Nick Clegg vows to tackle Britain’s lack of social mobility
Nick Clegg said it was a ‘national scandal’ that some of the country’s brightest children were left behind because they came from poor backgrounds. (Guardian)

It should be a national scandal – but apparently is not – that some of the country’s brightest adults are forced out of academia because their IQs are too high.

The account of the situation, and of the supposedly competing views on it, contained in the article from which the above extract is taken is wildly fictitious, and the various unexamined assumptions which are implied in it cannot be analysed without writing at considerable length.

However, I may observe that in 1946 I went to an Ursuline High School with a grammar school scholarship (at the age of 10), and even at that time the egalitarian ideology that would deprive the most able of opportunity was clearly operative, although not yet so explicit as it subsequently became.

I developed an increasingly strong conviction that the real motivation underlying the state-funded educational system was to block the way of the really exceptional. This, after all, is much the easiest way of making space at the top for the mediocre – to knock out the most exceptional (with IQs over 160, say) who would otherwise occupy an ‘unfairly’ high proportion of the top positions in society, so that more spaces are left to be competed for by the much larger population of people with IQs of around 140, or even 130.

What is the IQ profile of the population currently holding salaried academic appointments? I dread to think. Sixty years ago I read that the average IQ of those doing scientific research at Cambridge was – well, I forget the exact figure – something in the region of 120.

Nick Clegg could start to tackle the real problems of stasis in social mobility by addressing the difficulties of those here who have been deprived of the academic or other careers to which they are well suited.

The bell curve: one third are ‘special needs’?

In relation to my recent post regarding the shifting of the bell curve, it is interesting to note that there has recently been a spate of newspaper articles commenting on a perceived lowering of ability amongst schoolchildren.

An article in the Daily Mail (9 May 2012) quotes a Department of Education official, Dr Sidwell, as saying: ‘Even the outstanding primaries tell me that children at five are coming in with lower and lower ability to get on with their work.’

An earlier Daily Mail article (5 May 2012) gives some figures: of children aged four to sixteen, 21% are recorded (as of 2011) as having ‘special needs’, an increase from 19% in 2006; amongst nine to ten-year-old boys the figure rises to one third.

Various explanations for this are offered, in particular that it is due to bad parenting, or deliberate misdiagnosis to cover up for poor teaching standards. One of the articles is headlined ‘Poor parenting to blame for surge in special needs’.

A possible explanation that is not mentioned is a genetically caused reduction in IQ of the overall population. As my earlier post points out, an increase in the proportion of low-IQ people in the population implies a corresponding reduction in the proportion of high-IQ people.

Of course, it is characteristic of the exponential growth effect that it starts off small but continuously increases. The initial shifts are unlikely to be noticed. If there has been a shift in the IQ curve which is now causing noticeable effects among those of school age, this might prime us to notice some signs of reduced performance in those older than the current school-age population that might otherwise have gone unobserved.

Interestingly, another recent Daily Mail article (22 May 2012) mentions a study of adults’ spelling ability, reporting a poor standard, supposedly because of over-reliance on computer spellchecks. Tellingly, the youngest of this test population, the students, performed worst. I suggest that this poor standard may not be entirely due to an over-reliance on computer spellchecks.

Exponential growth may start at an imperceptible level, but by the time it has become noticeable, ever greater increases may be expected in the near future.

The reports of significantly lower standards in various areas over short timescales are compatible with the view that a significant shift in the IQ of the population has already taken place, and that the speed of the shift is very likely to accelerate.

Existential urgency and commercialism

And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness, for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:
And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there shall I bestow all my fruits and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.
And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.
The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.
(Luke 12: 15-23)

Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
(Luke 12: 33-34)

Jesus said:
There was a rich man who had much money. He said: I will use my money that I may sow and reap and plant and fill my storehouses with fruit so that I lack nothing. This was what he thought in his heart. And that night he died. Whoever has ears let him hear.
(Gospel of Thomas, log 63)

Comments

Sayings of this kind are usually taken as being against capitalism, or any kind of commercial activity. The alternative is supposed to be social interactions of a kind favoured by the prevailing religion.

Although my intentions were not obviously commercial, being only to take exams (but as many as possible) and to do research, Mother Mary Angela disapproved of them in a similar way, as being insufficiently people-oriented.

My awareness of the insecurity of finiteness, and the fact that one's life could be terminated at any time by various circumstances over which one would have no control, certainly contributed to my sense of urgency and the need I experienced to get on as fast as possible.

Other people might make plans about how I would not take exams before a certain age, get to university before a certain age, do research before a certain age, and so on, but it seemed to me in no way natural to hang about in a dangerous situation.

So in fact Mother Mary Angela and all concerned were really advocating that I should go in for time-wasting social interactions as if time was no object.

The modern ideology, and human psychology generally, seem to be very much geared against living at all purposefully, or with any sense of urgency. To do so is to behave as if anything one did mattered, or was of any importance, so it is taking oneself too seriously, which is much disapproved of.

The Gnostic form of this parable merely points out (without suggesting any alternative course of action) that all one's plans may come to nothing if one happens to die in the night, so it can really be seen as an incitement to urgency, in the way that I thought my plans for taking exams might be aborted by death or other adverse circumstances, so I had better waste no time with getting on with them as fast as possible.

The concept of moth-free treasure does occur in Thomas, but not as an alternative to commercial planning. It is the pearl of great price, which is worth more than anything else; but one might note that it is bought, and that it is a merchant who buys it.

Jesus said:
The Kingdom of the Father is like a man, a merchant, who possessed merchandise and found a pearl. That merchant was prudent. He sold the merchandise, he bought the one pearl for himself.
Do you also seek for the treasure which fails not, which endures, there where no moth comes near to devour and where no worm destroys.
(ibid., log 76)

Has the bell curve shifted?

One expects any variation in the IQ bell curve to show up most noticeably at the upper and lower ends, where the percentages approach zero along the x-axis.

It used to be said that the female bell curve was narrower than the male; so women were much less likely to be geniuses, but also much less likely to be idiots.

The shift in the bell curve subsequent to the onset of the Welfare State may well have caused a significant reduction in the numbers of people with IQs above 150 or 160, as the mean has shifted downwards. But if it has done, it has also created an even greater increase in the population of the dysfunctional, with IQs below 50 or 40. I speculated that if the number of people above a certain IQ level (100 + x) has been reduced to 1/n of what it was before the shift, then the number of people below (100 – x) might well have been multiplied by something like n.

My speculation turns out to be not too far off. If you reduce the population of the exceptionally intelligent by shifting the bell curve, without changing the shape, you more than correspondingly increase the population of the most dysfunctional.

Say that, before any shift takes place, the proportion of the population with an IQ over 140 is 0.38%. A shift in the mean of one point downwards reduces it to 0.31%, and a shift of 2 points to 0.25%. A shift of 5 points reduces it to 0.13%, which is about one-third of 0.38%. So in this case the number of people in the population with IQs over 140 has been reduced to a third of what it was.

The shift of the mean to the left would also have affected the proportion of those with IQs below 60, originally also 0.38%. A shift in the mean of 5 points downwards makes it 0.99%, i.e. 2.6 times 0.38%. Reducing the proportion of the population with IQs above 140 to a third of what it was, has at the same time increased the number of those with IQs below 60 (which is fairly dysfunctional for any purpose) to nearly 1 percent of the population, making a group formerly thought of as marginal into a considerable element in the total population.

If there are now one-third as many people with IQs above 140 as there were before the shift, say, then there are now about three times as many with IQs below 60. The reduction in the population of really high IQs may have something to do with why we (the real University of Oxford in exile) find it so difficult to increase the number of our associates, but it is otherwise easy to overlook.

What is probably less easy to overlook, if one is in a position to observe it, is the multiplication of people with low IQs and other genetic deficiencies who can never be self-supporting.

This is clearly a tremendous drain on taxpayers’ money, although it is diffused throughout the general cost of benefits, the NHS, ‘education’ and ‘social services’.

What is paid out to pensioners, on the other hand, is clearly identifiable. Pensioners are a section of the population with an average IQ above the mean for the population as a whole, so the finger can be pointed at them, and the process continued of transferring resources from the above-average to the below-average.

A graph illustrating the possible shift in the bell curve, with close-ups of the tails:

Graphics by Andrew Legge

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.

Selective laying bare

State-funded pensions will cost £5 trillion, today's Daily Mail informs us.

Laid bare for first time, £180,000 burden facing every British family
(headline, 28 April 2012)

But why is this being ‘laid bare’ for the first time, one wonders, and not any of the other burdens facing the British taxpayer? Such as, for example, the cost of social workers to take babies away from their families and shuffle them around from one foster family to another? The cost of paying foster families ‘child maintenance’ for having kidnapped children living with them? The cost of providing free ‘education’ for every child born to immigrant parents and other categories of parents?

The object, one supposes, is to justify new forms of taxation; the population of people of pensionable age, being one with average IQ above that for the population as a whole, is the ideal target to be blamed for the ever-rising costs of ‘social services’, and to be made to pay as much as possible in the way of extra tax. Presumably pensioners, especially those who are not public employees (doctors, teachers, social workers, etc) are to be as impoverished as possible by the time they die. Otherwise they may leave houses and other assets to their offspring, who are also likely to have above-average IQs. Heredity may be unmentionable in polite society (David Willetts), but there is some sensitivity to the fact that high-IQ parents may have high-IQ offspring. Even before they die, high-IQ parents may give positive assistance to their high-IQ offspring, if their financial resources, in the way of both income and capital, exceed their most basic needs.

If my father had had a normal pension at the end of his teaching career, he would have been able to give me financial support at a level which, in view of my lack of an academic salary or of income support, would have been appreciable and have at least slightly eased the pressures of constriction which were oppressing my attempts to remedy my position as an outcast. This was the position into which I had been thrown at the end of the ruined ‘education’, although it was universally assumed that I had turned my back on a university career voluntarily. ‘Oh, I thought you got what you wanted,’ my aunt gasped half a century later, having apparently assumed that whatever I found to do in exile must have been something that I wanted to do so much that I would prefer doing it in destitution and degradation, rather than having a high-flying university career.

The question of ethics with regard to pension policy is one of the issues on which critical analyses could be being published by Oxford Forum if it were provided with adequate funding to do so.

Should banks be forced to take on more risk?

Extract from an article by the Daily Mail's Alex Brummer:

Roughly one-sixth of construction output consists of putting up new homes. In the final quarter of last year housing starts were just 20,400 which is half the level of five years ago. Yet commercial housebuilders like Redrow and Persimmon are doing very nicely. How can this be the case? Having cleaned up their balance sheets after the Great Recession, most homebuilders are concentrating on upmarket homes in the South-East that are affordable only to the most affluent. The government’s scheme intended to help people get on the housing ladder, by offering up to 10 per cent in deposit assistance, is not working because the mortgage lenders refuse to offer loans at the appropriate cheaper rates to these people.

... the government could do more to get construction moving. The special liquidity scheme did support mortgage lending, in the wake of the first part of the recession, and the Bank of England may well have been too enthusiastic in pulling back the punch bowl. It was influenced by the fact that the banks felt prosperous enough to pay huge bonuses to executives and the feeling was that taxpayers should not be subsidising such immoral action. (Daily Mail, 26 April 2012)

As usual, it is supposed that the destructive consequences of socialism can be remedied by yet more socialism. Yet more transfer of resources from populations with above-average IQs to populations with a lower average IQ.

There was a time when banks lent money on commercial principles, i.e. only to those who already had some capital assets and who were the sort of people unlikely to default on repaying loans, whatever hardships they might have to undergo in the process. Thus the bank would continue to profit, and not lose, from the arrangement.

But now, of course, it is considered that banks, and taxpayers, should be forced to set their money at risk by lending it to those least likely to repay it, so long as such people express socially-approved intentions.

Even if such people are provided by the government with the money necessary to pay the deposit on a house, the banks still regard them as a bad risk, and refuse to lend them money at artificially low rates, in order to preserve themselves and their shareholders from further losses. This, in the modern ideology, is immoral. What are banks for but to transfer money from populations with higher average IQs to populations with lower average IQs?

No sympathy for the victims of socialism

This is something I drafted a long time ago but did not send because of lack of staff, money, and everything else that makes life tolerable.

copy of a letter to a senior academic

As the oppressive state closes in, there are protesters against capitalism camped outside St Paul’s, and a good deal of sympathy with them is expressed in many quarters.

I hope I shall be able to fit in writing something in praise of capitalism, since it has actually been the only positive factor in my life, and those who wish to abolish capitalism are wishing to destroy the chances of people who are in any way like me.

When I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education I bought the Financial Times and thought all day about how many sixpences I was adding to my capital (by not spending from my daily spending allowance) and how much capital I would need for the very smallest residential college with dining hall facility and ancillary staff.

But, slow and painful though it was, the accumulating coins did me far more good in the long run than the efforts I made to get a postgraduate degree with the grant from Trinity College, Cambridge. At the end of it the way into any university career channel was still blocked, and no financial support was available from any quarter until the King money, which enabled me to do introductory surveys in various areas which I had identified as having potentialities for research while I was doing the BLitt.

But again, this left me empty-handed. When the King money ended, our books still had to be published at our own expense, being blocked by those regarded as experts, to whom prestigious publishers referred them. So I still had no academic salary and no income from books.

Once you have been exiled from society, you should not suppose that it will be possible to return to a normal position in life by doing the same sort of research, and publishing the same sort of books, that you might have done as a socially accepted academic. Throwing money at the problem will not help, as I found. If you use your own money to publish a book, and even if you get it published under a respectable imprint, it will not change your position. You are still known to be a statusless outcast.

Publishing with your own money is ‘vanity publishing’, with which several people have taunted me, and no one has shown the slightest willingness to consider that a book might be a demonstration of one’s grievous misplacement, since if you can produce a book at all in such circumstances, surely it might be regarded as an indication that you could be producing far more if reinstated in a normal career providing salary, status and a hotel environment. This appeared not even to be considered when I was told that my book was still the ‘most referenced’ book in the field of ‘research’ in universities which had arisen since its publication.

The research which we had done with the King money withered on the vine, so far as we were concerned, while providing opportunities for overseas salaried academics, who made no progress that I would myself have regarded as significant.

I would, of course, have been quite willing to do research as pointless as theirs, so long as I was provided with equivalent salary, status and ancillary conditions. I could have undertaken to do only what other people might have thought of doing, but I would certainly have done it more efficiently.

The house in the Banbury Road continued to increase in value over the decades, and we continued to acquire experience of investment so far as our very small capital permitted.

So you can see that it is only capitalism that has ever done me any good, and my attempts to ‘prove my worth’ to senior academics by doing work to a high standard in bad conditions have done me no good at all.

Shifting the bell curve

David Cameron has suggested that the NHS and the education system should ‘close the gap’ between rich and poor.

Recently a grandfather of 29 was in the news. The low-IQ population seems to have a shorter generation length, i.e. seems to reproduce faster than the high-IQ (‘educated’) population. If at the same time it produces more offspring, say twice as many, as the high-IQs, it takes a surprisingly short time for the relative proportions in the population to change radically.

For at least 70 years now the more functional have been increasingly discouraged from producing children (a recent Daily Mail contains a warning to career women that leaving it too late to start families may damage the offspring). At the same time, the least functional have been encouraged, by ‘benefits’ and other measures, to reproduce early and prolifically.

There follows a very rough and simple calculation which shows how the bottom 25% of the population in terms of IQ could become the bottom 75%. There has been ample time since 1945 for a macroscopic shift in the balance of the population to take place and it may well have done so, which might account for the reports of ever-declining standards in primary schools. Bad though the schools no doubt are, this may be the inevitable result of the IQ level of the intake, and not of behavioural deficiencies on the part of either parents or teachers.

Suppose we start with a population of 20 with IQs below 90 (“Bs”), and a population of 60 with IQs above 90 (“As”).

Let us assume that at an average age of 30 the As add two offspring per pair, so after 30 years there are 60 + (30 x 2) = 120 As, and after 60 years 60 + 60 + (30 x 2) minus the original 60 who (let us assume) die at age 60, i.e. still 120.

Let us further assume that at a lower average age of 20 the Bs add 4 offspring per pair, so after 20 years there are 20 + (10 x 4) = 60 Bs, after 40 years 20 + 40 + (20 x 4) = 140, and after 60 years 20 + 40 + 80 + (40 x 4) – 20 = 280.

So now we have 120 As to 280 Bs, so that the ratio has changed from 75:25 to 30:70.

Graphics by Andrew Legge

David Willetts describes the belief in heredity as something that ‘cannot be mentioned in polite society’ (The Pinch, p. 198). Academics who refer to the possibility of hereditary factors are liable to lose their jobs pretty quickly. It is implausible to suppose that there are not hereditary factors affecting individual differences, however much academia likes to believe otherwise, and it is certainly unscientific not to entertain possibilities.

The rationalised intention of closing the gap between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ (correlated with above-average IQ and below-average IQ) has in all probability only succeeded in creating a bottomless pit into which resources can be poured.

Providing the ‘poor’ with additional resources may simply create an even bigger population of the ‘poor’, while at the same time placing increasing pressure on the ‘rich’, by taxation, to postpone and limit their families.

Has measured average IQ declined since 1945? Perhaps it has not, but this may simply show that IQ tests, as used, do not give a realistic picture of trends over time. The people who devise and apply the tests which are used are usually salaried academics with a vested interest in a certain outcome. When my colleague Christine Fulcher was working for her psychology degree from the Open University, she gathered that the intelligence tests which are used are always being modified to make them ‘fairer’ or more ‘appropriate’ to modern conditions.

Nick Clegg (Daily Mail, 5 February 2011) asserts that the ‘middle class’ will not notice the effects of extra taxation on their ‘lifestyle’. Maybe not; it will be quantitative rather than qualitative in most cases, but it will add that much extra delay to their paying back university debts, saving enough money to start buying houses, start families, send children to non-state schools, etc. Hence adding a bit of acceleration to the shift in the bell curve of IQ. Some of those working here now were at times salaried as university lecturers and in other professional capacities, and some in the future might be again. Taxation has diminished, and would again diminish, their ability to build up capital towards setting up our fledgling organisation as a properly funded and productive academic institution.

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.

[first posted 7 February 2011]

The Great Pensions Swindle

I have a book entitled The Great Pensions Swindle* which, 40 years ago, made some useful points about the likely unreliability of state pensions. The following, however, is unrealistic:

The breaking point is not postponable indefinitely. The resistance to periodic increases in ‘social insurance’ contributions will begin all the sooner when the ‘contributors’ realise they are paying not insurance contributions but an income tax. (p.128)

In fact, no significant realisation arose that “National Insurance” contributions were just a form of income tax, which increased the Government’s current spending money. Otherwise the book anticipates very much what has happened. What happens when a future generation decides it prefers to spend its money on what is fashionable at the time (overseas ‘aid’, social workers, ‘universities’, etc.) rather than providing a former generation with the pension it thought it was paying for? The pensions are 'too expensive'; they are suddenly means-tested, and paid at ever later ages.

Not least, let it be clearly understood that ‘right’ (to the pension) and ‘contract’ are two more good words that have been made misnomers. A ‘right’ to a pension that a man acquires by saving for it is unambiguous. The ‘right’ a man has to an income when he can no longer work is of a different kind. The word has been re-defined to mean a moral right or claim on society. But transfers of income from one age-group, or class, or generation, to another represent decisions by one group, or class, or generation, to help another in time of need. No group, or class, or generation has a ‘right’ in any absolute sense. ...

In civilised parlance ‘contract’ means a voluntary agreement between two parties each of whom thinks it will gain. There is no such voluntary agreement between the generations on pensions. Indeed, there can hardly be one since future generations cannot be consulted; and if they could they would hardly agree since the terms are loaded against them. (pp.129-130)

* * *

Retrospective legislation has become increasingly frequent, and by now no one seems to remember that there was ever anything against it. It used to be said that the individual had a right to know what was legally open to him (in taxation, etc.) so that he could plan his affairs to secure the best outcome in view of his own interests and priorities, as he conceived them to be.

The recent changes in the ages at which state pensions become payable is really an egregious example of retrospective legislation, and directly affects people in as bad a position as we are. If a company which offered pension schemes were suddenly to announce that all its pensions were to be paid two years later, those who had been paying into the schemes might well wish to sue it for breach of contract. When the government does the same thing, no legal redress is available. This has happened recently and seems likely to happen more, so that my junior colleagues’ pensions recede as one approaches them. The age at which one of them will start receiving her pension was first shifted from 60 to 62, and then again to 64. Another’s pension was shifted from 65 to 67, and seems likely to be further delayed to the age of 68.

Thus the state has already deprived us, who are trying to build up towards an adequate academic institutional environment, of seven years’ pension money, i.e. £35K at today’s pension rate.

I have previously pointed out how means-testing of pensions retrospectively reduces the benefit received in return for contributions paid. This means nearly two thousand pounds per person per year. The proposed tax of £20K towards the cost of state ‘nursing care’, whether such care is received or not, was first proposed as a tax on estates on death, but is now suggested as a capital levy to be paid by every pensioner on reaching retirement age. If that were made retrospective, so that it applied to myself as well as to my colleagues, that would represent an additional confiscation of £80K.

There are several other examples of abandonment of principles, and I should be able to write about them at length, because they are actually very serious, although no one else appears to recognise this. If Oxford Forum were provided with adequate funding, we could be writing and publishing analyses on this issue which are currently being ignored in favour of the usual pro-collectivist arguments.

* Arthur Seldon, The Great Pensions Swindle, Tom Stacey Books, London, 1970.

[First published 11th September, 2010]