Will the future generations be able to keep all of the balls in the air?
Life can often be a precarious business. It is full of risk, from day one and before. So what of our situation now, how much risk is involved here? and what is that risk. And for the future?
We currently operate a situation of tertiary risk balance, we are essentially balancing three major risk areas which we have to keep in an equilibrium, otherwise our life as we know it fails.
This is outside of the commercial and business world. Did you appreciate the fragility of how we currently exist? Here are three essentials to consider:-
Increasing house prices, but for how long will they remain viable?
The housing market, long a topic of discussion at dinner parties, but small talk aside, where we live is a key factor in where we work and where we create jobs.
If you are in the jobs market, no doubt you will have signed up for alerts to see jobs advertised all over the country. But when you stop and analyse those, you see the variance in salary, according to area they are situated in.
With houses in London and the South East of England, you wonder how long the jobs market there and the property market will remain viable. But we've been saying this for years, low interest rates have maintained a calm sea for years now, but what happens when the wind gets up and creates choppiness and the rates fluctuate?
Frankly, I cannot see how the markets of houses and jobs in these areas can remain viable. For a business to operate in the South East or London there are big capital costs such as business rates and rents to start with before you start to make a bean of profit.
So what happens when the stores pull out of London? Will the property investors step in and buy up, turning these to residential use? The current model is sell on and not take a hit, but for how long can prices rise? Is it essential to be in London? Not anymore for some businesses, especially with home working and improved delivery services.
But this may lead us to our next subject of jobs and whether we will have one soon?
How relevant are your skills now or irrelevant tomorrow?
The prediction that 35% of jobs may be lost to automation and robotics in the next 10 years is well known. So how will you survive?
This brings a new dynamic into play. In two ways. Firstly, how will you survive? That is likely to be in the form of a Basic Income Guarantee. This will pay you £10-12k a year tax free.
But this is no comfort to the person with the massive mortgage who needs £70-100k+ a year.
Employment is changing, with automation to the fore, new jobs will be created in technology, but there will be a yawning gap, just as happened in the 1980's when people with 'hands on' skills will also be needed. They are in a shortage scenario at present, the answer is for you to get transferrable skills that a robot hasn't and you will have a future.
The BIG payment will also allow people to train up and get skills experience in new areas, but it has to be integrated. The DWP model is dead, it has to change and move away from a hectoring, nasty and sanction based control situation into a system of training and development.
It can no longer survive as a bureaucratic bureau that costs £389 million a year to run, paying out ONLY around £17 million in unemployment benefits. That is not a viable business model, it is a job creation scenario straight out of the Soviet Communist era. Time for a new way forward.
Future people - how will a shrinking demographic change our society?
So, where are the future people coming from to populate our jobs and houses? Not it would seem from the existing stock.
Many women are for a variety of reasons not having children. This can be from not conforming to a stereotype, financially because of high mortgage payments, or because they enjoy a career too much to lose the momentum and chances of progression.
The 'knackered mothers wine club' sector of women who are trying to 'have it all' and are just tired out because their lives are too hectic is not healthy for them or their families. 'Helicopter parents' who swoop in an out of their children's lives are another problem, lack of parental involvement, attention and substitution of attention by expensive gifts is harming the children.
A 'cotton wool' and risk averse society is in danger of creating false hazards, with children being put in fear of harm around any dark corner. They are being conditioned to be spoon fed dependency.
They need to be exposed to reasonable and controlled risk so that they can be useful in later life and not stand on the sidelines waiting for someone else to act. Recent work experience placements I observed, came with a long list of hectoring 'don'ts' and 'not allowed to' how are these kids going to function in life if they do not take risks?
The education dynamic has changed, with many more women going to university or higher education in general. The job market has adjusted more to a technology based economy away from a 1950's scenario of secretarial or shop work, where a woman married early and had a family early.
The birth demographic has changed from around 24 years of age to anything up to 42 or later. Of course this has a knock on effect, on education places, future jobs, indeed future social security, future housing.
Demands which were fairly smooth in passage, like a calm sea have now changed, in some areas, particularly with high housing costs, you are now getting career singles or career couples in place of families and swathes of the retired who were working once.
The educated and dynamic is one area of the ideal genetic pool you need to promulgate for future success, the educated and aspiring, to take up the high end jobs and high value housing costs. But also, the supporting cast of trades people isn't there either and this is worrying. Where before night followed day, will the sun rise tomorrow?
Nature makes compensations, those that may not be academically gifted are often extremely gifted with manual dexterity and understanding of machinery. We need to develop through technical schools these skills because we need them and will continue to.
Currently our system is sustainable, because of foreign investment buying into UK property. But unless the UK can encourage suitable immigrants with skills and acumen rather than uneducated people who choose not to fit in and just take benefits, it will start to slip. A points based system is long overdue to import quality skills.
The 'mechanisation' and march of the machines scenario isn't going away. These factors along with BIG, form a new society based on getting quality of life back rather than having to do meaningless jobs just to service living costs.
We will still need to make and design things but we need to maintain a balancing act to do so.
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