Means-testing of pensions

I am reposting this piece from August 2010, in the light of the recent Daily Mail investigation by Tony Hazell that the government will not be paying the additional state pension to everyone, as claimed. The report also points out that an inflation increase, which certain former employees were guaranteed, will no longer be paid.

When Money Mail contacted the Department for Work and Pensions, it claimed it had never actually paid these inflation increases and the belief stems from ‘an over-simplification’. Yet we have obtained Government statements and leaflets published over many years which state time and time again that it does pay these inflation increases.

It looks as if the policy of cheating national insurance payers, where they think they can get away with it, is alive and well.

* * *

Of course the terrible financial crisis is taken as justification for yet more penalising of the more functional members of society in favour of the less functional (‘we must protect the poor’).

Both the means-testing of pensions, and the charging of those who have some capital assets for ‘care’ either in their homes or NHS prisons, are iniquitous. However the ‘care’ situation is complicated by treating as a ‘benefit’ (the same thing as a person might have paid for with his own money) what is really better described as an oppressive persecution. So I leave discussion of this complex question for the moment and confine myself to the rise of means-testing.

The state pension was initiated well before the rise of the Welfare State circa 1945, and for that reason was conceived as something which would be received as a right by those who had made the necessary number of qualifying payments - which were supposed, always fictitiously, to provide a fund which could be invested, and from the income of which the pensions would eventually be paid.

When I first went to the Society for Psychical Research after being thrown out of Oxford University in 1957, I thought that I must do everything possible to reduce the disadvantage at which I would be in comparison with, say, an Oxbridge professor of physics on reaching retirement age. At the time I did not find it credible that it would take me many years to get back into the right sort of academic position, but until I did, I would want the intervening years to drag down my pension income by as little as possible. Therefore I paid voluntary contributions for the unpaid student years, and went back to paying them each year as soon as I was no longer receiving a salary from the SPR.

As time passed, I became aware that the hostility to the idea of my working my way back into a suitable career was very great, and perhaps permanently insuperable. I continued every year, without fail, to pay voluntary pension contributions both for myself and for anyone who became associated with me and might be permanent. So I was paying four, and maybe five or six, contributions per annum out of what was usually a nugatory income. After forty years my own pension became payable, although I was still having to pay three voluntary contributions a year for other people. But the situation was turning around from being a drain on our pathetic resources to an annual income, although even when all the pensions became payable, the total income would still be very far short of what was needed to run the very smallest residential college cum research department.

Soon after my 40 years of efforts had been rewarded with the then basic state pension, I started to notice statements by officials to the effect that pensions would be allowed to ‘wither on the vine’, implying that no attempt would be made to keep them adjusted to inflation. After I had received my pension for some years the government decided that these pensions should be means-tested, so that help could be given to the ‘poorest’.

I felt (and always have done) pretty close to being the poorest of the poor myself, in being deprived of a salaried career, but I had built up capital over the years. This was because my only way of getting ahead in life had been to provide myself with capital, the gains on which could be used to finance my institutional environment, so that eventually I might be able to do something.

The means-testing was achieved surreptitiously. Annual increments became much smaller than they would previously have been, while an annual ‘Pension Credit’ (initially ‘Minimum Income Guarantee’) payable to those with very little in the way of savings began to increase.

Making the pensions means-tested was retrospective legislation, as everyone paying into them had been led to believe that they would not be means-tested.

Now I receive only the basic state pension, and not the supplement, which is paid to those who had made no attempt to increase their independence by saving money, such as the chronically unemployed who roam the streets of Oxford and draw disability allowances.

I believe it is the case that I would be receiving thirty-six percent more than I am receiving, if I were eligible for pension credit.

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. Meanwhile, the idea that it is ‘fair’ to penalise better-off pensioners is likely to receive further reinforcement from pseudo-research published by the universities.

From heredity to genocide?

Today there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled:

Intelligence – born smart, born equal, born different

According to the Radio Times,

The analysis of inherited intelligence is something of a moral maze ... [does research on this topic] really threaten all our utopian ideas of equality?

Francis Galton
(1822 - 1911)

In 1869 Francis Galton published his book Hereditary Genius, exploring the possible genetic basis of high ability. The idea of hereditary ability had already been of long standing when Galton’s book appeared.

The concept of an ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) as a measurable predictor of academic success only started to become of serious interest with the rise in state education. However, IQ soon became unfashionable again, perhaps because studies such as those of Cyril Burt suggested there was a significant inherited component to it, which did not fit with the politics of the time. And so research on IQ was gradually expunged from academic awareness.

IQ began to be referred to as ‘the false hypothesis’, as if it had been intrinsically bound up with the assertion of hereditary ability, whereas in fact the heredity idea had been around since well before the nineteenth century. Dismissing the concept of IQ as dubious also made the idea of heredity per se taboo in academic circles, and it now appears to have become something that is not even ‘talked about in polite society’.*

According to the Daily Mail** preview of the programme, Galton’s ideas

were taken up with lethal enthusiasm in many countries in the early 20th century, leading to the theory of eugenics, sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ and, ultimately, Nazi genocide.

This of course is the standard way in which the concepts of heritability and innate intelligence are nowadays made to seem controversial, to the point that it supposedly becomes reasonable to suppress discussion of them. The argument is that they are somehow responsible for the Holocaust, as well as other atrocities.

An alternative line of argument, which seems no less plausible, is that what made the Holocaust, the Gulags, and various other genocides and human rights abuses possible is the notion that the collective has a right to invade the individual’s territory, provided it is done for the benefit of society.

Accepting this line of argument would make concepts such as ‘the interests of society’, the ‘right of the majority’, ‘social justice’ or ‘state planning’ seem ethically dubious, and would point towards such concepts being strenuously avoided in discussion.

However, in practice this line of argument is never applied.

* David Willetts, The Pinch, p.198
** Weekend Magazine, 26 April 2014

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the areas of intelligence and heredity, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topics continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.

Invitation to members of the Oxford and Cambridge Club

My colleague, Dr Charles McCreery, has been a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London for a

Oxford and Cambridge Club
at dusk

number of years, the membership of which is confined to graduates of the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

Charles recently spent the night there after attending a launch party in the City for Hugo Williams, a contemporary of Charles at Eton, whose latest book of poems, I Knew the Bride, has just been published by Faber & Faber.

We would like to issue an open invitation to any member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club to consider moving to Cuddesdon or nearby, either immediately or on their retirement, and becoming associated, in any way that appealed to them, with the work of Oxford Forum.

They might consider investing in a property, either in Cuddesdon or nearby, for use at the weekends or for living in permanently if they were retired.

The village of Cuddesdon is within 3 miles of the M40 to London, and 20 minutes from the Haddenham & Thame railway station which is only 50 minutes by fast train to Marylebone station.

Cuddesdon is on a hill, 3 miles outside the Oxford ring road, so has clean air and good views to the Chilterns, ten miles away.

There is an ancient church in the village, and an Anglican theological college, Ripon College, which can provide conference facilities and accommodation. The village pub, The Bat & Ball, is notable for its excellent and reasonably priced food, and has overnight accommodation.

Emotional abuse – by teachers and social workers

It seems the government is planning to update the law on child abuse to include ‘emotional cruelty’ as an imprisonable offence.

Changes to the child neglect laws will make ‘emotional cruelty’ a crime for the first time, alongside physical or sexual abuse.
The Government will introduce the change in the Queen’s Speech in early June to enforce the protection of children’s emotional, social and behavioural well-being.
Parents found guilty under the law change could face up to 10 years in prison, the maximum term in child neglect cases.
The change will update existing laws in England and Wales which only allow an adult responsible for a child to be prosecuted if they have deliberately assaulted, abandoned or exposed a child to suffering or injury to their health.
The new offence would make it a crime to do anything that deliberately harmed a child’s ‘physical, intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development’.
This could include deliberately ignoring a child, or not showing them any love, over prolonged periods, damaging a child’s emotional development.
(Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2014)

It is of course ludicrously vague to define a crime in this way. The existing reference to physical health is vague enough, and results in such appalling instances as children being snatched from parents because of supposed risk of obesity, exposure to cigarette smoke, or refusal to let surgeons perform operations of dubious value. The mind boggles at the various ways a definition of emotional harm might be interpreted by zealous and ideologically motivated police or social workers.

We may assume that, whatever suffering a child may be undergoing at home, the intervention into the family and the coercive break-up, involving forced separation of parent from child, is liable to be highly traumatic and cause long-term psychological damage to the child. This aspect of intervention is surely obvious, but is rarely mentioned in such discussions. Nor is the damaging psychological effect on parents discussed.

The analysis being offered in support of the proposed change is highly asymmetric. There is no suggestion that social workers themselves might face prosecution under the new law if their actions damaged the child’s psychological well-being; or that their actions are already doing so in many cases, and that they would therefore have to modify their behaviour if the new law came in.

It seems likely that, after an initial period, a law as vague as this would come to be used to express all manner of disagreement with parental behaviour, and as an excuse for agents of the collective to behave in a destructive manner; not merely in ways which fit with the current image of preventing psychological cruelty, such as deliberate humiliation.

There are many parental practices with which ‘expert’ views on child rearing disagree. Why should all these not also be conveniently classified, in due course, as ‘cruel’? Particularly in a climate where activists such as the Child Action Group (apparently the main driving force behind the current proposal) are constantly pressing for change, in the direction of more activities being recognised as things the legal system should prevent.

For example, it is commonly held to be good for children that they be ‘allowed to fail’. Rather like the phrase ‘emotional cruelty’, this can be interpreted in an almost infinite number of ways. The American Enterprise Institute, describing the book Real Education by Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve), says that the aim for educating America’s elite should be ‘not to pamper them, but to hold their feet to the fire’. Oxford High School for Girls was recently said to have introduced tests in which it is impossible to score 100 per cent, in order that the girls ‘understand it is acceptable not to be “little Miss Perfect”.’

I would myself regard educational policies such as these as abusive and damaging. Yet ironically, with a law as vague as the one proposed, parents could conceivably be accused of abuse if they fail to adopt such policies themselves. Once it is seen as acceptable for the legal system to adjudicate on the psychological aspects of parenting, one might easily find that nebulous concepts such as ‘allowed to fail’ are being used to attack individual parents’ approaches to child rearing, and hence to break up families.

The idea of blaming parents (but not agents of the collective) for emotional abuse is only making explicit what has been going on, in practice, since the onset of the Oppressive (‘Welfare’) State in 1945.

My parents were accused at various times of ‘not letting me’ meet enough people, or have enough social life; of ‘pushing’ me to get on with taking exams fast, which was actually what I wanted to do, and suffered from being prevented from doing; not compelling me to join the Girl Guides, and so on.

The pressure placed on them – to force me to become a different person, and appear reconciled to arrangements made against my will – successfully ruined my prospects in life and their lives as well, since my father’s health broke down and he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance. There was no law at the time of the kind now proposed, or perhaps I might have been taken into care, which would no doubt have been extremely damaging both to my parents and to myself.

I would certainly describe as emotional abuse – or, indeed, as persecution – the pressures placed on my parents, and on myself, by agents of the collective. I would also describe the attitudes of the schools and education authorities involved as sadistic and abusive.

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the area of social policy, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topic continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.

Correlation is not causation

Articles in the media commenting on education tend not to make clear the distinction between correlation and causation.

For example, a recent Daily Mail article reports on a study (by France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies) which was published in the European Sociological Review. The article states:

Comprehensive schools prevent pupils from poor backgrounds achieving their potential, a study has claimed.
Researchers compared reading standards in countries which have retained grammar schools with those which have phased them out, such as the UK.
They found that family wealth played next to no part in a child’s achievements when they were taught according to ability. But a disadvantaged background was more likely to count against youngsters in countries that shun selective education.

Presumably one is meant to think it is a good thing if a child’s achievement shows no correlation with family wealth. However, this would only reflect meritocracy if there were no correlation between parental success and offspring ability, which seems doubtful.

The fact that the presence of selection in a state educational system tends to go with low correlation between parental wealth and offspring achievement does not necessarily mean that selection generates more meritocracy. There may be other reasons, not to do with the absence of grammar schools, why in the UK the clever children of poorer parents do worse than expected.

* * *

William Alfred Green,
father of Celia Green

My father took the grammar school scholarship exam in the early 1900s. The population of Newham, where he lived, was about 400,000 then, which suggests a population of several thousand in his age group (by year). Of those taking the scholarship exam for Newham in the same year as him, twenty passed, and he came top. (My mother, also living in Newham, won a grammar school scholarship too.)

My father’s home circumstances were not propitious. His ostensible parents neglected him, there were few or no books in the house, and he appears not to have been a native English speaker, having come to England from Poland at about the age of eight. In spite of these bad circumstances, he gained the top scholarship.

In his case, parental neglect, lack of books in the home, and attendance at a low-grade primary school (from which he played truant) were associated with success in the scholarship. There were other factors, such as his very high intelligence and drive, but these factors are genetic and thus unlikely to be taken into account when modern ‘experts’ study school and exam performance. Academic studies tend to focus on the family and school environments, presumably because these factors are more amenable to social engineering.

My father’s success at achieving a grammar school place, in a fiercely selective system, was not sufficient to prevent his being handicapped by his unfavourable background. His ambitions were frustrated, and he ended up in the relatively lowly position of state primary school headmaster.

His deprived background and/or his exceptional abiltity were always against him. Very high ability can be enough to arouse hostility and opposition in other people and make life very difficult for the possessor of it.


Update:

Another example, from today’s Daily Mail (28 March).

A study (by the Higher Education Funding Council) claims to have found a link between type of school attended and class of degree awarded, with state school students doing better at university than those from private schools with the same A-level grades. Allegedly, this implies that the ability of private school pupils achieving a given level of A-level success is lower, and hence that private schools must be better at ‘pushing’ their pupils – supposedly justifying a ‘contextual’ admission policy, i.e. having a lower entrance requirement for state school students.

But interpreting the correlation in this way assumes that degrees are somehow more reflective of ability than A-levels.

I do not myself see that success in a modern degree course need have much correlation with ability at all. A study carried out on Oxford psychology students some decades ago ostensibly showed that class of degree was negatively correlated with IQ.

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the area of educational policy, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topic continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch box

Teachers and social workers should tell people that they are bad parents and to stop failing their children, the head of Ofsted has warned.

Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw told MPs that, as a former head teacher, he ‘saw the result of children being brought up badly by their parents’ and would routinely tell parents when they were failing. He also said communities should play more of a role in supporting problem families, referring to the ‘old phrase “a child is brought up by the village”...’

‘These families need to know that they can’t go on treating their children like this, they can’t go on behaving in this manner and they’ve got to hit the targets that are being set by social workers,’ he said. (Daily Mail, 23 January 2014)

Socialism is not compatible with freedom. He who pays the piper calls the tune, even if he is paying with public money (no, taxpayers’ money). If you accept something that is supposed to be a benefit from the state, it will not come without strings attached, and there is no limit to the areas of your life that may come under state control.

The following is a description of an invasion of liberty. Such invasion is still regarded as sufficiently extreme to be described as ‘a step too far’ or ‘unnecessarily officious’.

A six-year-old boy who went to school with a bag of Mini Cheddars in his packed lunch has been suspended for four days after teachers said it contravened its healthy eating policy. Riley Pearson, from Colnbrook, near Slough, was excluded from Colnbrook C of E Primary School after teachers discovered the snack and called in his parents.

After a meeting with headmaster Jeremy Meek, they were sent a letter telling them Riley would be excluded from Wednesday until Monday because he had been ‘continuously breaking school rules’ ... (Daily Mail, 31 January 2014)

There is no reason why a given pupil should benefit from the imposition of current dietary ideals. Even if the resulting distortion of diet, compared to what would be privately chosen, has some kind of physical benefit on average for pupils attending state schools, it may well have a negative net effect in any individual case.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

There is no reason why state education should necessarily benefit any particular pupil, even if benefits the average (which may be doubted). Again, a policy of enforcing attendance should be regarded as unacceptable. Parents may have valid reasons for wishing to exclude their offspring from such institutions, or to minimise the amount of time they spend there. John Stuart Mill’s father, for example, kept him away from school, in order to avoid ‘the contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling’. (*)

Update:
Riley Pearson has now been expelled, and his younger brother has been banned from Colnbrook pre-school. (Daily Mail, 5 February 2014)

* The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, 1873, p.35.

Near-death experiences: more obfuscation

This was first published in September. I am re-posting it in connection with an article about a new book on near-death experiences which appeared in Saturday’s Daily Mail. This, as usual, muddies the waters by perpetuating the confusion that the phenomena are either ‘genuine’, in the sense of providing evidence of the afterlife or the paranormal, or, if not ‘genuine’ in this sense, are to be dismissed.
The author of the book, Penny Sartori, appears to have some connection with the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, currently based in Lampeter but originally part of the University of Oxford. The Centre was set up shortly after we published our initial pioneering research on out-of-the-body experiences, and cleverly succeeded in drawing away any publicity and research funds we might have got, including about OBEs, and getting them for itself. It may well have been set up expressly for this purpose. It certainly never carried out, as far as I am aware, any actual research on OBEs.
The present obsession with near-death experiences, and the false dichotomy that these kinds of phenomena must be either (a) real (meaning paranormal), or (b) dismissable, is to be deplored. It contributes to our being blocked from receiving any funding for research that would actually advance understanding of the phenomena.

There has recently been some more interest in near-death experiences, including a large number of hits on the posts about them on my blog. This is always very irritating, as there is no sign of response to our appeals for funding.

A number of areas of research, on which quite a lot of money is being spent throughout the world, were initiated by us. In some of the cases it could be claimed that the research now being done might have developed independently of our drawing attention to it, as the information was there, although ignored (e.g. the development of distorted interpretations of early forms of Gnostic Christianity).

However, there was no concept of near-death experiences until it arose out of nominal research on out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs). This in turn had developed (with some delay) following the publication of our first book [1] on OBEs, which made these appear as a type of experience that had sufficiently consistent characteristics to justify academic recognition. Our work provided much less justification for relating OBEs to the question of ‘proving’ survival than did the previous associations with spiritualistic beliefs.

The new and spurious category of near-death experiences arose from there being some cases reported of OBEs in hospitals. Eventually the concept of near-death experiences replaced that of OBEs in popular attention, so that the question of ‘proving’ survival or otherwise once again became the issue predominantly associated with such experiences.

However, the resulting association of OBE-type experiences with the idea of extreme states is likely to be highly misleading. In one study conducted by Professor Ian Stevenson [2] of the University of Virginia, for example, it appeared that only about half of the subjects of supposed near-death experiences were in any sense near to death.

My colleague Charles McCreery carried out an experiment, as part of his doctoral research at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford, in which subjects attempted to induce OBEs in the laboratory. He found that two of his subjects reported subjective phenomena similar to those of so-called near-death experiences. Both subjects referred to ‘tunnels’, and one of them also described having the impression of ‘being on elastic going towards a tiny white light in [the] distance’. Neither of these subjects showed any sign of being near death. The one who reported the white light in the distance was a young female graduate student aged twenty-six. [3]

1. Green, C. (1968). Out-of-the-body Experiences. Institute of Psychophysical Research.
2. Stevenson, I. (1987). Personal communication to Charles McCreery.
3. McCreery, C. and Claridge, G. (1996). ‘A study of hallucination in normal subjects – I. Self-report data’. Personality and Individual Differences, Vol 21, no. 5, pp. 739-747.

‘We are appealing for £200,000 to assist my colleague Dr Charles McCreery in completing the work for his book on out-of-the-body experiences, then publishing it and publicising it. He has received no funding during the writing of this book, which is based on the research he carried out for his Oxford DPhil on out-of-the-body experiences. The book includes the results of both experimental work and extensive analyses of case material.
Dr McCreery’s book is a rigorously scientific analysis of out-of-the-body experiences, with discussions of the philosophical implications of these and related phenomena. It deserves to be completed, published and widely advertised. Those who claim that they want to advance human knowledge should provide us with the financial support required to enable this to happen.’
Dr Celia Green

more about modern ‘research’

The morality of Professor C D Broad

text of a letter to an academic

Throughout my life my problems have all arisen from the same cause: the hostility of the increasingly dominant socialist ideology to exceptional ability, in fact to anything that may be regarded as ‘superiority’.

Dame Janet Vaughan, the Principal of Somerville College, was a rabid atheist egalitarian socialist and very hostile to me. Practically the first thing you were told about her on arriving at Somerville was that she was an atheist. At that time (in the early 1950s) this was slightly shocking, and it was certainly unusual for a person in a position of responsibility to assert it so ostentatiously. I remember a mature middle-class lady, not an undergraduate, sounding as if it was regrettable, saying that she thought it was nicer to know that the Principals of colleges were Christians, presumably because she thought this might guarantee their benevolence towards their students.

Dame Janet was very avant-garde. To that extent that you can say that my problems in life were made worse by my being a woman, because probably at that time the Masters of most men’s colleges were officially Christian and more old-fashioned in outlook. The head of a men’s college would probably have been a bit more tolerant towards someone arriving at their college with a need to do things in a way that could alleviate, rather than exacerbate, the problems which arose from their previous maltreatment by the educational system.

C.D. Broad

The attitudes of society in this country have been getting worse all the time throughout my life, both before and after I arrived at Somerville. One of the influential academics on the circuit of the Society for Psychical Research was Professor C.D. Broad, who managed to prevent any financial relief getting to me through the siege blockade.

Of course, you may say, as no doubt they all hoped that I would say: I have no hope at all, since all these people are part of the same monolithic academic system, so I should give up and do something else.

But in fact my internal determinants were and are too strong, and I could only go on aiming at the same sort of life doing the same sort of things, because what had made me aware of my need for that in the first place had been my internal determinants, rather than the fact that there seemed to be a straightforward and effortless way of getting it. So if it now appeared that the way to it was not open, but firmly blocked, I still could not give up trying to get it.

I am still working towards the life I need, one in which I have a socially statusful and well-salaried academic position, which would provide me with the hotel environment and intellectual activity which I need for my well-being.

When Sally Adams and Margaret Eastman (both Oxford graduates) joined my research organisation, I was hopeful that one or other of them would be eligible for the Perrott Studentship associated with Trinity College Cambridge, which I had held some time earlier. It seemed likely such an application would be successful since there appeared to be no other possible candidates wanting to do research in this area. We could certainly have done with the money.

I was shocked when the Electors decided to award the studentship to Professor Broad (himself one of the Electors), apparently without even advertising it, for the purpose of writing and delivering some lectures on the subject – later published in book form as Lectures on Psychical Research. As far as I am aware, the conditions of the Studentship stipulated that the money should be applied to original research likely to further knowledge about putative paranormal phenomena, but Broad’s lectures were in the nature of philosophical musings.

Although I never saw the Trust Deed myself, I was certainly under the impression that the Perrott Studentship was intended to support people who could not support themselves, thereby making it possible for them to do research.

Although this cannot be proved, I would not be surprised if the award to Broad was made to ensure that the only official British source of finance for the subject would not be available to me. Professor Broad certainly did not need the (relatively meagre) amount of money doled out, being already well set-up and provided with a college environment.

Broad was a ‘moral philosopher’. Perhaps that means that, like other moral philosophers, his work was really aimed at destroying capitalism (and with it any possibility of individual freedom) and at promoting some version of global communism.

‘The philosophy department of my unrecognised university would, if financed to do so, be publishing criticisms of current work in moral philosophy, pointing out its unexamined assumptions and implications.’ Celia Green, DPhil

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

The retrospective pensions swindle

In view of the current debate about the possible cutting of benefits to pensioners, I thought it worthwhile re-posting this piece from 2010.

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 extremely serious, though 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 of a kind currently ignored in favour of the usual pro-collectivist arguments.’ Celia Green, DPhil

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’
Charles McCreery, DPhil

* Arthur Seldon, The Great Pensions Swindle, Tom Stacey Books, London, 1970. Arthur Seldon CBE was joint founder president, with Ralph Harris, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank.

Killing bright rat babies

The late Professor Hans Eysenck once told me about an experiment in which a population of rats was divided into ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ on some criterion for rat intelligence. The rat offspring were then switched to different parents, in such a way that the bright rats were given the offspring of the dull rats to bring up, and vice versa. It was found that the bright rats brought up the dull rat babies successfully, while the dull rats killed the bright rat babies which they were given.

As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, natural selection encourages forms of behaviour which secure favourable conditions for the descendants of the individual in subsequent generations. So it looks as if it may be advantageous for the survival of a rat if the number of rats in the population it has to compete with, which are descended from parents cleverer than its own, is minimised.

The experiment suggests it may have become programmed into the genetic constitution of rats that they should kill, if possible, young rats which are cleverer than themselves. On the other hand, it appears rats have no programming to kill young rats which are less clever than themselves, presumably because their presence in future populations would pose no serious threat to their own offspring.

If natural selection has favoured such behaviour in rats to the point of modifying their genotype, we may speculate that it is even more likely to be present in the human constitution, since the range of opportunities present in human society, and the ways in which advantage may be taken of them, are even more varied, and offer greater potential advantages to those able to make use of them, than the variety of circumstances which may be made use of by rats of differing abilities.

Someone who becomes aware of this experiment may well be shocked by the result, and protest that it could not possibly be applied to humans. Professor Eysenck himself seemed to have resistance to the implication. He told me that anti-high-IQ behaviour would only prove adaptive for people in more developed societies, and thus could not have had time to modify the human genotype. His argument was that only in developed societies, with extensive business and finance activities, would having a higher IQ give the owner a sufficient advantage, to motivate other people to be hostile to him, or even kill him. This argument did not, however, make much sense to me, given that rats can scarcely be said to have ‘developed societies’ in this sense.

If there is a tendency in humans corresponding to the desire of rats to kill young rats cleverer than their own offspring, it would certainly help to explain the way the education system has developed as society has become progressively democratised. In spite of occasional nods to the supposed special needs of the ‘gifted’, the system is clearly geared (and increasingly so) to promoting the interests of the low-IQ population, and to making life well-nigh impossible for those of exceptional ability.

There is evidently a resistance to considering the possibility that the average human being may have hostile (potentially to the point of murderous) attitudes, whether conscious or not, to individuals of exceptional ability. Professor Eysenck told me that the results of this experiment became unavailable soon after it had been carried out – though he didn’t explain why – so it may be that they have never been published.