... naming our age

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

given that this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-tragic-tale-of-the-pensioner-who-killed-himself-after-begging-for-help-over-benefit-cuts-10029754.html

and this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/englands-new-mansions-monstrous-carbuncles-or-superb-architecture-10030005.html

are both stories from the same front page today, what nominative indication do they give us for our present age ... Neo Hanoverian perhaps? or The Age of Inequality [after Hobsbawm and Picketty]?

suggestions please .......

[french frank]

An awful story - and terrible mistakes made for these 'civilised' times. But I don't think this is the worst 'Age of Inequality' - just that times have been much better, and we always expect things to improve. The scale of the inequality may well be worse because the scale of the wealth which now exists has previously been unimaginable. But the scale of the poverty has always been heart-breaking. It's hard to have less than nothing.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

.. then 'The Fall from Grace'?

[kernelbogey]

The Age of Indifference?

[Dave2002]

From the first of these

She told the work and pensions select committee: “We ensured that we followed all of our processes correctly.”

What kind of excuse is that if the procedures aren't adequate for purpose?

I think we should call our age "the age of specious excuses".


I thought we might have been querying the "digital tipping point", but no, yet another article about rich so and sos building ostentiously while others can't afford to live.

[Serial_Apologist]

French frank is partly right about the contrast with the pre-1979 era of better distributed wealth distinguishing this downturn from previous ones. Deeply ingrained historical instincts led working people to make the most while the sun shone. Costly and ever changing technology, which is hard as well as mind numbingly boring to have to keep up, with makes it hard for those of us who prepared ourselves psychologically and as much as possibly materially for the present we foresaw, but much harder for those whose incomes never allowed for this, even in better past times. What effect all this is having on those who fell lock stock and barrel for the me society believing the credit surfeit would go on forever is harder to foresee, given their lack of any social power base, though the fun looting that took place during the 2011 riots may well have been indicative.

Were I more sanguine I would adjudge those neo-Georgian monstrosities ideal for taking over by the homeless when the revolution comes.

[ardcarp]

Simply The Age of Homo Sapiens. It can only be a few millennia at most before our particularly noxious species has rendered the planet uninhabitable by its own kind. But should an intelligent species emerge after a few million millennia more, it will surely shake its head (or corresponding anatomical part) in sorrow at the ghastly irony of 'sapiens'.

[ardcarp]

Interesting that this very topic...inequality... is being discussed on The Moral Maze (R4) right now.

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting that this very topic...inequality... is being discussed on The Moral Maze (R4) right now.

Thanks - I'll have a listen to that tomorrow.