Sunday 24 January 2010

News snippet

Emails can clump together to form a quagmire into which your brain, friendships and plans can get sucked.

When I was working I always had a limit on the number of unread emails I allowed myself to have - it wasn't a fixed number, that would have been unpractical, but it was around twenty. And so (often several times a day) I'd blitz the inbox, discarding, delegating or dealing with things as they arose The system worked fairly well most of the time.

I'm now more-or-less unemployed so I don't have anything like as many emails to deal with, and those emails I do get I feel I want to commit more time to. But I don't seem to have the inclination, so they build up, and clump together and before I know it I'm stuck.

I subscribe to the newsletters of many interesting organisations including new economics foundation. This morning as I decided to clear through the email logjam I found this astonishing snippet from them:-

Political fixation on growing the economy is becoming a 'false god' according to Lord Turner, chair of both the Financial Services Authority and UK government's Committee on Climate Change. Speaking to nef Policy Director Andrew Simms on the BBC's World Tonight programme, Lord Turner said that not only was pursuing economic growth at all costs damaging the climate, it wasn't doing us much good either. 'All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness,' Lord Turner said.

Did you catch that - the Chair of the Financial Services Authority is suggesting that economic growth is a false god? -

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