Bush should save the USA from choice

Economic libertarians are wedded to choice believing that people should be given free rein to make bad choices as well as good – by smoking, for example, or failing to cake out a pension plan. Once they have had time to rationally calibrate tht costs and benefits, they will realise that bid choices lead to suffering, and change their behaviour. But this is wishful thinking. Generally, I believe human beings consistently underestimate the future costs of their actions, choosing instant gratification instead. Self control is especially hard in affluent societies, where temptation abounds. Hence the obesity epidemic we are faced with so much cheap, tasty food that it becomes impossible to resist, even when we know it will make us fat. This is why, increasingly, people are looking to the state to help them make better decisions. Smokers have willingly submitted to greater and greater regulation, now consumers want the Government to rein in the junk food industry. Libertarians duly rage against the nanny state, but we increasingly run to it for protection – from ourselves.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the UK where we have a worldwide reputation for poor health, thunks to our well publicised fondness for warm beer, cigarettes and deep fried fish and chips. But according to an extensive new survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, us Brits are actually in better shape than the Americans. Among US citizens aged 55 or over, the likes of cancer, diabetes and heart disease are almost double those in Britain. Even more galling is the the fact that Americans spend $5,200 per capita for health care every year – whereas the British spend just $2,100.

The question is why as some may be tempted to interpret this study as a vindication of socialised medicine, since Britain provides health care free of charge to all its citizens.  But that conclusion is debatable when you look more closely at the data. The study actually shows that the wealthiest and best educated Americans – those with access to the best health care – have rates of disease that are comparable to the poorest Britons. The problem, in other words, is not lack of access to doctors. It may be, however, that Britain's universal health care system puts more of an emphasis on public health and early detection, whereas the profit-driven US system tends to treat diseases without systematically looking to prevent what causes them. Americans need to figure out what they're doing wrong, otherwise the human and economic costs of their failing health could burden them for decades.

The answer may lie outside the medical care system altogether. Americans exercise less than us Brits and get more nutrition from heavily processed foods – but even after adjusting for differences in rates of obesity, smoking and alcohol consumption between the two nations, the disparities were still stunning. A plausible culprit is different attitudes towards work in our two cultures. The British are far less obsessed with their careers, reserving much more of their time for leisure, their friends at the pub, and family. Americans work harder and longer and take greater risks in switching jobs and starting companies. The benefit of such a vigorous culture is obvious: a more dynamic economy. But the price is relentless, grinding stress means Americans are literally be working themselves to death.

The Apprentice: an reflection of Blair’s Britain

The recent UK run of The Apprentice embodies a favourite New Labour theme: promising meritocracy, insisting that what matters is not your background but your talent and your drive. But it also shows that the era of deference has not yet been banished. Even when hurling abuse at each other, the contestants only ever refer to their would-be boss in one way – Sir Alan. What this suggests is that there is now a new class to be deferred to: the aristocracy of wealth. Indeed, the programme rests on the ideological assumption that money is the only goal that matters. Generally, all the tasks set by Sir Alan have only one rule: whoever makes the most profit wins. A decade ago, New Labour thinkers talked about encouraging companies to look beyond short-term shareholder gains and consider the wider interests of "stakeholders". The Apprentice is confirmation that the dream has died. As such, the programme is a fitting reminder of the Blair years. Perhaps that will be a comfort when the Labour party finally turns to its own PM and says: "You're fired".

Chirac and the Globalisation of the English Language

Jacques Chirac has pledged to fight the spread of the English language across the world after walking out of a rececent EU summit because a French business leader committed the grave offence of speaking in English.

"We fight for our language," President Chirac said of the recent French walkout when Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, the French head of the European employers' group Unice, addressed the summit in "the language of business".

Mr Chirac, who led three senior ministers out of the talks, added: "I was profoundly shocked to see a Frenchman express himself in English at the table."

The walkout provided a vivid illustration of French sensitivity about the decline of the language, which used to dominate the EU. English has overtaken French in Brussels after the arrival of Sweden and Finland in 1995 and the "big bang" expansion of the EU to eastern Europe in 2004. With the internet fast turning English into the world's first language, Mr Chirac insisted that he would continue to promote French, which is spoken as a mother tongue by 100 million people, a relatively small number.

"You cannot base a future world on just one language, just one culture," he said.

This invariably leads us to question the extent that globalization has impacted on languages: some languages are increasingly used in international communication while others lose their prominence and even disappear for lack of speakers. Researchers at the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawaii have identified five key variables that influence the globalization of languages:

1. Number of languages: The declining number of languages in different parts of the world points to the strengthening of homogenizing cultural forces.
2. Movements of people: People carry their languages with them when they migrate and travel. Migration patterns affect the spread of languages.
3. Foreign language learning and tourism: Foreign language learning and tourism facilitate the spread of languages beyond national or cultural boundaries.
4. Internet languages: The Internet has become a global medium for instant communication and quick access to information.
5. International scientific publications: International scientific publications contain the languages of global intellectual discourse, thus critically impacting intellectual communities involved in the production, reproduction, and circulation of knowledge around the world.

Given these highly complex interactions, research in this area frequently yields contradictory conclusions.  Unable to reach a general agreement, experts in the field have developed several different hypotheses. One model posits a clear correlation between the growing global significance of a few languages – particularly English and Chinese – and the declining number of other languages around the world. Another model suggests that the globalization of language does not necessarily mean that our descendants are destined to utilize only a few tongues. Still another thesis emphasizes the power of the Anglo-American culture industry to make English the global lingua franca of the 21st century.

To be sure, the rising significance of the English language has a long history, reaching back to the birth of British colonialism in the late 16th century. At that time, only approximately 7 million people used English as their mother tongue. By the 1990s, this number had swollen to over 350 million native speakers, with 400 million more using English as a second language. Today, more than 80% of the content posted on the Internet is in English. Almost half of the world's growing population of foreign students are enrolled at institutions in Anglo-American countries.

At the same time, however, the number of spoken languages in the world has dropped from about 14,500 in 1500 to less than 7,000 in 2000. Given the current rate of decline, some linguists predict that 50-90% of the currently existing languages will have disappeared by the end of the 21st century.

Men are the new women

Men are the new women – just look at Tory leader David Cameron, trying to be Mr Nice Guy all the time, criticising shops for putting sweets by the checkout counter and sounding like a housewife nattering at the school gates. Acting nice and caring was once a ruse used by ugly guys to get laid, but now this lame, wholly contrived persona has become a template for British masculinity. In response to feminism and the rise of the alpha female men have become weak, gelatinous omega males unwilling to acknowledge let alone express their manliness; defined as confidence in the face of risk and an easy assumption of authority.

These are amazing times for British women. For the first time, virtually no career is barred to them. Nearly half the "class 1" jobs – those that affect the running of the country – are now held by women. For women as individuals, this is great news. For society as a whole, however, it comes at a price: not least, the loss of female altruism. Until the mid-20th century, women were chiefly occupied, one way or another, with caring.

Educated women went into teaching or nursing; not grudgingly, because their options were limited, but in a spirit of love and duty. Their beliefs fired them with the desire to do good. They did a huge amount of voluntary work for charities and local communities, as well as looking after children and elderly parents. Today, the best-educated women go into well-paid, high-status jobs; very few do volunteer work until they retire. The disappearance of the female service ethos from teaching and nursing, meanwhile, may explain why the quality of those services is seen to have declined, despite vast increases in public spending. Women are richer than ever, in experience as well as money, but freedom has cost us more than we realise.

The British feel at ease with Big Brother

Americans were up in arms recently over the White House's secret wiretapping programme. But if you think that failing to get court warrants to monitor the phone calls of people suspected of contact with al-Qa'eda is bad, you should see what goes on in here in Europe. Wiretapping is far more common and less supervised on this side of the Atlantic – especially in Britain. Police in the UK conduct tens of thousands of wiretaps each year, for which they only need the approval of the Home Secretary; judges have nothing to do with it. The paradox is that when it comes to consumer information, we guard our privacy much more fiercely than Americans do. While we mostly regard the state as benevolent – unlike Americans, who are ever obsessively vigilant of governmental incursions on individual rights – we are terrified about greedy corporations misusing our personal details. This is despite the fact that European companies can't legally share most consumer information and cases of identity theft are much less common than in the US. So, feel free to hand over your credit card number willy-nilly,just be careful what you say on the phone.

Exercise, Religion and Morality

The religious community has dragged out old data that showed attending religious services regularly can extend life expectancy. The "new" study released by Daniel Hall, a resident in general surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, is actually a compilation of data from old studies.

The study compared the effects of exercise, faith and medical treatments. Nothing proved better for people than exercise, extending life by 3 to 5 years. Next was medical science at 2.1 to 3.7 years. Last and least was religious observance at 1.8 to 3.1 years.

"The significance of this finding may prove to be controversial," Hall said. "But at the very least, it shows that further research into the associations between religion and health might have implications for medical practice."

In a related study, it was found that praying for other people to recover from an illness is ineffective.

The study of more than 1,800 heart bypass patients found that those who had other people praying for them had as many complications as those who did not.

In fact one group of patients who knew they were the subject of prayers fared worse.

"No one single study is ever going to provide an answer," said Jeffery Dusek of Harvard Medical School, who helped lead the study published this week in the American Heart Journal.

Perhaps the studies should have focused on why people spend time in church instead of the gym especially when only 15 percent of obese people can actually bring themselves to admit that they're obese.

The other 85 percent live in a world of comfortable, well-padded denial.

With Americans growing so fat they need special modified car seats for their fat children, this is hardly encouraging news.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had people of various shapes and sizes estimate their weight, height, and whether they were obese or not.

The obese folks accurately predicted their weight and height — just not their relative fatness.

"I think it's a misconception in people's minds about what constitutes obesity," said Dr. Kimberly Truesdale, the study's lead author.

 "I think a lot of people when they think about obesity they think of someone that's extremely obese, 400 pounds or so."

In fact, a woman who stands 5'4 and weighs 175 pounds is technically obese.

This is backed-up by a separate study which makes it clear that Americans have absolutely no morals but like to live by well defined rules. Of the 10 "moral questions" asked by pollsters, the one sin people found the least morally offensive is the one sin they all commit every day: overeating.

Just 32% said they believe gluttony is immoral.

With two-thirds of Americans officially obese, the question hardly needed to be asked.

Perhaps they should choose a diet in which you eat nothing enjoyable as this has been proven to help you lose weight. In a review of 87 nutritional studies, researchers found that vegetarians and vegans consistently weighed less than meat-eaters. They also found that switching to a non-meat diet, even without additional exercise or reducing carbs, led to weight loss of about a pound a week.

"Our research reveals that people can enjoy unlimited portions of high-fibre foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to achieve or maintain a healthy body weight without feeling hungry," said the lead author of the study, Dr. Susan Berkow.

This backs up findings from another recent study of overweight, postmenopausal women that showed they could lose weight on a vegetarian diet without exercise or portion control.

Wow – who would have thought?

Guide to the NHS crisis

When you consider the pressure individual hospitals are under it's hardly surprising the NHS is facing a debt crisis. Take Ipswich Hospital, which has been ordered to make its first budget cut in more than a decade. Not only will £4m be shaved off its £l74m budget for 2005/06, but £8m of debt will have to be repaid. It's hard to see how the Suffolk hospital can square all this with the expanding demand for health care and the spiralling wage bill created by Government largesse. A senior haematologist at the hospital says even he was shocked when his salary went up by 28% last year to £140,000. Drug costs, meanwhile, are rising by 20% a year, while the number of patients using the hospital is 10% up on last year. Many of these patients are elderly people in need of expensive and complex treatments.

"Only ten years ago, half the people in here would already be dead," says a senior nurse.

Rationing free health care is not a popular idea. But the population is ageing fast, and the long-term prognosis for the NHS is starting to look bleak:

How wobbly are NHS finances?
Very wobbly indeed. By the end of the year it will be at least £800m over budget; it could end up being as much as £1.2bn in the red. True, this represents a mere 1 % or so of this year's NHS budget of £87bn, but that is a level of indebtedness unprecedented in the history of the health service. So dire are the figures that NHS chief executive Sir Nigel Crisp, until recently touted for the top job in the civil service, has taken early retirement.

How are hospitals reacting?
In a survey of NHS chief executives, almost two-thirds said they've been forced to close wards to control  finances. Operations have been postponed; hospitals have frozen staff vacancies. Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) – the local bodies  set up in 2002 to "buy" hospital and GP services for the people in their area, and  which control fully 80% of the NHS budget – are going into reverse.

Formerly they urged hospital managers to increase the flow of patients; now they enjoin them to fix a "minimum waiting time" to save money. Eastbourne Downs PCT has just told the town's hospital not to operate on any patient who hasn't been waiting a full six months. London hospitals have been  warned against "unexpected overachievement" in reducing waiting times.

The Da Vinci Code: THE PLOT THICKENS

The Da Vinci Code trial is turning out to be stranger than fiction. Perhaps not Dan Brown’s fiction (there are no naked albino homicidal monks on the loose), but strange nevertheless.

The Telegraph’s reports that the court examined the millionaire author’s copy of the book which he is accused of plagiarising. As the Guardian report puts it,

“the most striking witness in court 61 yesterday was a disintegrating paperback book. Spine broken, its dog-eared pages bristling with tape markers, under-linings and margin notes.”

The day in court dealt with why the book was annotated in this way if, as Brown claims, he did not buy it until long after he began his novel. He told the court he used it to mug up on some of the tricky questions he was asked at book signings about links between Jesus Christ and the Dark Age kings of France.

The case has clearly gone to court for the money, not the literary content of the novel itself. Putting the cash to one side, that one writer should claim authorship of such a terrible book is surprising enough. That three people have done so is more puzzling than the code itself.

The welfare state is stirring up racism

If Labour wants to alleviate racial tensions in this country it must reconsider the principles on which today’s welfare state is based. The current system is essentially charitable, in that it uses means testing to target money at those most in need. This seems fair, but it stores up poisonous resentment on the ground, as shown by a new study of some of London’s poorest communities, The New East End. The study describes how working-class families who could once count on making their way to the front of the housing queue through patience and good behaviour now find themselves leapfrogged by applicants in greater need, often recent immigrants. This has had disastrous consequences for race relations: the individuals most likely to lose out on housing were far more inclined to be racist. The study found that Bangladeshis who had lived in the area for 30 years or more also resented housing being given to what they saw as undeserving new entrants. Means testing is not so fair after all, when it works for the minority and succours racism.

How to be happy – part 1

In looking at ways to influence and change our surroundings it is helpful to notice where we focus our time and energy. We each have a wide range of concerns–our health, our family, problems at work, the national debt, etc., and it is these things in our lives that make up our Circle of Concern.

As we look at those things within our Circle of Concern, it becomes apparent that there are some things over which we have no real control and others that we can do something about. We could identify those concerns in the latter group by circumscribing them in a smaller Circle of Influence.

The problems all of us face fall in one of three areas: direct control (problems involving our own behavior); indirect control (problems involving other people’s behavior); or no control (problems we can do nothing about, such as our past, or situational realities). A proactive approach is the first step to the solution of all three kinds of problems within our present Circle of Influence. Some people interpret proactive to mean pushy, aggressive or insensitive, but that isn’t the case at all. Proactive people are smart, they are value driven, they read reality, and they know what’s needed. And they focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging, and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.One way to notice where our energy and focus is located is to distinguish between the have’s and the be’s. The Circle of Concern is filled with the have’s:

‘I’ll be happy when I have my house paid off.’

‘If only I had a more patient spouse…’

If only I had better employees/co-workers…’

If only I had a boss who wasn’t so demanding…’

The Circle of Influence is filled with the be’s:

‘I can be more patient…’

I can be a better employee…’

‘I can be more wise…

‘It’s a character focus. We empower what’s out there to control us. The change paradigm is ‘outside-in’–what’s out there has to change before we can change.

The proactive approach is to change from the inside-out; to be different, and by being different to effect positive change in what’s out there–I can be more resourceful, I can be more diligent, I can be a better listener, I can be a better leader.

There are things (like the weather) that our Circle of Influence will never include. But as proactive people, we can create and carry our own physical or social weather with us. We can try to accept those things that at the present we can’t control, while we focus our efforts on the things that we can. Test the principle of proactivity for 30 days. Try it and see what happens. For 30 days, work only in your Circle of Influence. Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.