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!

Commuters, as a tribe, tend to be “unloved”.  Victorians called them “the dark horde”. T.S. Eliot compared them to the souls in hell. But now suddenly we need them, desperately. “Come back, commuters. Rally to your city. It needs your fares, your rents, your Starbucks, your Prets, your nights on the tiles.” Without them, cities are dying. In London, Tube travel is down around 75%. “Shopping is crippled, at 32% of normal footfall.” Boris Johnson is urging us to return to our offices, without success: a third of UK office workers have returned to their desks, against 70% to 83% in Germany, Italy and France.

But while the PM was encouraging us to go back, the Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, was declaring that there was “absolutely no reason” for people to stop working from home. Besides, Britons seem to have fallen in love with working from home , or WFH, as it is now known. And no wonder. One manager at a big insurance company told me that there had been a 15% improvement in productivity among home workers – perhaps because they were no longer enduring long, stressful commutes, and were able to sleep for longer, and spend more time with their families. So what if the rail unions and coffee chains charging £3 a cup lose out as a result? A YouGov survey found that 68% of homeworking newcomers would like to keep working from home when the crisis is over.

That’s all very well for them, but not so good if you live in a tiny flat, or work in a company serving commuters. Few phrases make the heart sink more than: “You are invited to a Zoom chat.” Cue “a screen full of squinting faces”, some periodically disappearing, everyone saying: “No… no, you first… you… what?” For all its benefits, the technology is deeply frustrating, and it’s no long-term a substitute for meeting colleagues face-to-face. “Please let tech-distancing be for the pandemic, not for life.”  (Simon Jenkins, London Evening Standard, repeated in The  Week, 15 August 2020).

My comment:  I wonder how an improvement in productivity of 15% was measured.  Or is it a figure plucked from the air?  All I know is that my British family members and friends are, indeed, working successfully at home, and are not complaining.  I can see an argument for an Epicurean solution: splitting time between office and home (50% each?), a compromise.  It does help to talk face to face with your colleagues, especially when it comes to people management. Awkward interviews may be even more awkward if you are dealing with them online.  I used to like looking into the eyes and watching the body language.

The British, it would seem, are keen on the new trend – induced by Covid-19 – of working from home. In a recent YouGov poll, only 13% of British adults felt workers able to do their job from home should return to the office; and as a Morgan Stanley survey has shown, only a third of UK office staff have returned to their usual workplace, compared to 83% in France and 76% in Italy.

But fans of home working would do well to bear in mind the case of “Bob”, says Andrew Hill. He was the US software developer for a big company who in 2013 outsourced his job to a Chinese consulting firm, giving them a slice of his salary while he traded on eBay and watched cat videos. His work didn’t suffer: on the contrary, “quarter after quarter” his bosses marked him as “the best developer in the building”. Except, of course, his work wasn’t being done in the building. And there’s the rub. For if working from home makes it easy for you to outsource your job without being detected, it also makes it easy for your boss to outsource you. If you can do your job anywhere, anyone can do your job. (Andrew Hill, Financial Times).

Comment:  “ Bob” was  dishonest and devious.  As such he was un-Epicurean.  Makes a good story, but you don’t do that to the boss; you hope he will have the integrity not to do it to you.

Universities with huge endowments are pretending remote learning is the same experience as in person teaching.  Harvard, for instance, is offering the bulk of their courses online, as are the University of California system, Yale, and Princeton.

What they all are not doing is reducing tuition, even though a significant portion of the value these educational institutions provide is now lost indefinitely. Princeton offers a 10% price cut, but  Harvard  ($40bn endowment ) still charges full tuition. 

Remote learning, no matter how well-intentioned, is a diluted product, and students deserve a tuition reduction for sitting at home and staring at a laptop screen. Professors cannot connect with students in the same way. And the ancillary benefits of college – making friends, networking, joining clubs, playing  sport– are  lost.

College costs have soared, and now almost every institution, in the age of coronavirus, faces a reckoning. There is an argument that students, especially at prestige schools, are still getting the value of a (prestigious) degree and therefore should pay the full freight. Isn’t the diploma ultimately what matters? But that’s not how colleges and universities pitch themselves to unsuspecting freshmen.

College life is supposed to be an experience. Part of the tradeoff of taking on crippling debt is supposed to be the creation of unforgettable memories, those four life-changing years you’ll never have again. Remote learning promises none of that.

Public schools are in a tougher position than their wealthier private counterparts, generating much of their revenue from tuition.  Many states have left world-class public institutions begging for money, especially after the 2008 economic crash. . Without a massive federal bailout package, public universities and community colleges will be suffering for years to come, starved of tax revenue in the wake of the pandemic.

College costs have soared over the decades owing to declining public aid, expensive athletics, increased demand, and the rising cost of staff, particularly those not tied to the faculty – and now almost every institution, in the age of coronavirus, faces a reckoning. They can continue to overcharge students. Or they can attempt a measure of economic justice.   (Ross Barkan, The Guardián July 11 2020, edited for length)

My comment: What universities should do is to stop the “arms race” in athletics, which has consumed huge sums of money and added to the indecent cost of university education. The writer was an oarsman during his time, always making academic work the priority, so I have nothing against sport; it just has to be kept in sensible perspective.  Epicurean moderation!

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