The middle market is the toughest part of every industry, not just fashion.  Even so, it’s striking how much pain is being felt in the “middle stratum” of US menswear, where “bankruptcies are piling up like pawed-over pairs of trousers at a clearance sale”. Names like Barneys, Brooks Brothers and J.Crew are all in “very deep trouble” – demonstrating that the middle market, “big and appealing as it is”, is potentially lethal territory.

When trouble hits, high-end players invariably “seek bigger dollars by moving downmarket”, while low-cost producers “seek higher margins by moving up”, thereby squeezing out the middle dwellers. Usually, the cycle simply continues. But it may not this time – because, in addition to the problem of mid-market economics, “demand for mid-range menswear is disappearing”.

Most men today have just two types of clothes: their “best stuff” and the jeans and T-shirts they wear at weekends – and, increasingly, for work. Those of us who enjoy “variations in sartorial tone” have become “oddball hobbyists, like birdwatchers or opera buffs”. It’s fun, but there’s not much profit in it. (Robert Armstrong, Financial Times, 22 August 2020).

My comment: No snappy dresser me, but I rather like dressing up to go out to dinner or the theatre. People take you more seriously when you are well dressed and groomed and obviously look after yourself.  They seem less interested in jeans and T- shirts…………I think.

This year, in the US, 30.2% of 18-year-olds have university places.

Almost any sort of professional job requires a degree these days, and the graduate premium (the earning difference between those who did and didn’t go to university) is £10,000 a year on average.

The trouble is, however, that “most people aren’t average” and, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a fifth of graduates are actually worse off for going. And as the number who do so keeps rising  the graduate premium is likely to shrink as degrees become ever more commonplace.

Which raises awkward questions about whether it is wise for the state, which pays almost half the cost of people’s university education, to be bailing out the 13 universities thought to be at risk of going bust. The truth is that “firms are crying out for people with all sorts of skills – web design, software development – that aren’t much taught at university”. Yes, this country does need to spend more on education. But not on its universities.   (Emma Duncan, The Times)

My comment:  It’s sad ( and annoying) that the media relentlessly talks about money – how much more you earn than those who never reach university.  This sends an un-Epicurean message that income is all that matters in the modern world.

I would posit that, while it’s natural to want a chance for a well- paid job, it is the experience of university that matters for the rest of your life – an understanding of life, mind training, the improved ability to think things through and to be adaptable and creative, to make lifelong friends and to acquire better person-management skills.  Not to mention growing up!  As for technical skills, they still have to be learned, degree or not.  It was always thus.

In my day ( in the UK) only 4% of the young population went on to further education.  The world is better for the 30% now attending university.

The modern conspiracy theory is usually traced back to Augustin Barruel, a former Jesuit who argued in the 1790s that the French Revolution was the result of a clandestine intrigue dating back centuries, carried out by secret societies: Freemasons, Templars, Bavarian Illuminati, and so on. Barruel later expanded his theory to include the Jews, giving birth to the “Judeo-Masonic myth”. This has been wheeled out to explain every upheaval in Western history, from the events of 1848 to the Russian Revolution, to the outcome of the First World War. As adapted by Russia’s Tsarist secret police, and then the Nazis, the myth was used to justify some of the most brutal episodes in European history.

In his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, the historian Richard Hofstadter argued that right-wing US fringe movements were particularly susceptible to such thinking. The bogeymen changed, from the Illuminati to Catholics to communists (or, he might have said, liberal paedophiles). But each time, the “style” was the same, blaming complex social ills on “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic yet subtle machinery set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life”. And such an enemy, of course, demands not “political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade”.   (The Week, 22 August 2020)

My comment: Conspiracy theories are the resort of those psychologically messed up people who are incapable of quietly discussing or debating policies on which they disagree.  If you are dumb, uneducated and inarticulate, your resort is to drag the other guy down in the dirt.  “Sucking the blood of little children?” Pathetic.  Grow up!