Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog
"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and then again I just sits"
From the June edition of Wired,
“What high-speed means of transportation emits less atmospheric carbon than trains, lanes, and automobiles?
The humble counterweight elevator put into service in 1857, which has made vertical density possible from Dubai to Taipei.”
An interesting article by the FT’s Economics Editor, Chris Giles, this morning in which he suggests that ‘the gap between action and sentiment puts the economy at a tipping point’.
Take surveys of households and companies at face value and the economy appears to be in free fall. Most measures of business confidence are sharply down on a year ago and the Gfk/NOP poll of consumers’ confidence about future economic prospects has declined to its lowest level since 1982.
But what households and companies are saying and what they are doing has rarely been so different. For all the misery poured out to pollsters, hard figures so far show people behaving as if they really believe Britain’s economy problems will be short and shallow.
Companies are not yet taking really tough decisions to cut costs. Instead they are keeping their workforce intact, presumably in the belief that it is better to hang on to employees in bad times because the good times will be with us again soon.
Good to know that swimming will soon be free for the over 60s. According to Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport,
“Swimming has universal appeal for all ages and provides the opportunities for families to participate in healthy activity together. Our aim is to help as many areas as possible remove charges and provide some kind of free swimming proposition. All the evidence shows that it removes barriers to those who are inactive. It is for local authorities to decide just how far they want to go.”
Let’s hope that we don’t get fined if we don’t go swimming. The last thing I want to do is participate in healthy activity with anyone else!
One of the delights of being away from the office on holiday is the freedom it brings from the tyranny of the chargeable hour. Nonetheless I enjoyed Michael Skapinker’s column The jury is out on family life and the law in the FT on 22 April, in which he looked mainly at what he referred to as the 50:20 ‘scandal’, that 50% of law graduates are women but only about 20% of partners are female, but which began with the fees we lawyers charge, following Mr Justice Floyd’s remarks in the BlackBerry case.
Selling time is not what we should be doing, and things are changing. How quickly is another matter. The problem is that it is considerably easier to sell time than value, and when I have argued the matter with my partners (most of whom are wedded to the chargeable hour), their usual reply is that if it works, why change it. The point they are missing is that either we will have to change, or clients will change us.
But back to 50:20. Skapinker makes good points
In accounting for the failure of women lawyers to advance to partnership, I think we can largely discount sexism as a factor. No doubt there are misogynistic lawyers, and others who secretly doubt whether women can hack it, but for firms to be engaging in widespread rampant, or even subtle, discrimination would make no sense.
First, the level of attrition among women lawyers is ruinously wasteful. The cost of turning graduates into proper lawyers is high, and the 50:20 figure suggests that well over half of the expensively trained female recruits are dropping out along the way. No profit-minded law firm (and, as the BlackBerry case demonstrates, lawyers are intensely profit-minded) would deliberately fritter away investment on this scale.
Second, if some law firms were discriminating against women, others would surely have the nous to snap up these highly capable discards.
Everyone knows what the real problem is: much of law, as practised at the highest level, is incompatible with family life. The pressure to bill for thousands of hours of work, so evident in the BlackBerry case, helps see to that.
But is this all?
Add to this Susan Pinker’s argument, set out in The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap, that the workplace gender gap is not the result of discrimination but of differences in brain structure, hormones, motivation, empathy and risk aversion, and choice. It may not play well with the sisters, and the argument is controversial, but the question needs to be asked.
It is not April 1, so it must be true. According to a report in today’s Telegraph, talking to yourself is actually good for the brain and mental well being. According to Julie Henry, the Telegraph’s Education Correspondent,
Studies have found that “self-talking” can aid concentration, help solve problems and lift depressive moods.
I suppose it may depend upon what you say to yourself. Working in an open-plan office, I cannot but hear one of my partners, who is forever exhorting himself to “Get a grip” and “Come on, get on with it”. Talking to yourself may, as the psychiatrist Paul Horton is reported as having found when carrying out his survey, help to raise glum spirits. I just reckon that my next door neighbour is barking.
Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog 