In software development, it is sometimes said that the lazy developer is the best developer. She knows when to code longer in order to reduce future work – making systems that fix themselves, at slightly larger initial cost, saves her time (and therefore money) in the long run. It also reduces “firefighting,” or sloppy fixes made in a rush when a system is noticed to be down at a critical time.

She avoids the effort, and the stress, for her future self: future her is lazy, so present her must be proactive. This is the very definition of sustainability; building things to last, not just for the present, quick buck.

Sustainable = Lazy

The same strategy could work for most businesses. If you train your staff well, early on, and foster/maintain a thinking, pro-active atmosphere in your office, you’ll need to spend less on management and other overheads going forward, and have less HR headaches. And your customers will be happier because, compared to your rivals, you’ll provide faster, better customer service.

The same could be said for most other aspects of a business. An initial investment of time/money/effort can improve time/money/effort situations further down the line. There’s a strong business case for sustainable business practise in almost every situation.

So, why are most businesses not lazy enough?

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a sustainable business culture. And this has a lot to do with an irritating piece of economic theory: the comparison of present and future worth via accumulation functions.

Basically, this means that people value Jam Today more than Jam Tomorrow – putting the Jam in your cupboard* until tomorrow means it loses economic value. This means that you have to make a certain amount of return on your Jam (typically more than you’d get out of investing the Jam somewhere and getting a return) in order for economists to think there’s any point to your having the Jam.

Their logic is perhaps clearer when thinking about a business – there’s no point to doing business if you could make more money by selling it and putting the money in a savings account.

However, the logic is ridiculous by any sustainability measure. We made Jam with our strawberries so that they would last.

Economics needs to start properly accounting for the rocking increase in efficiency obtained by spending half an hour last week thinking about the problem – building a model of economics that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels for growth but grows out of better analysis, technique, information sharing and quality.

We need to stop powering our economies with finite resources and start powering them with brains. By being lazy.

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* or fridge, if you’re insane and don’t understand the point of jam.

this is a response to Henry Tam’s post “Debt or No Debt”

Cameron was talking about paying off personal debt and banks leading to businesses not individuals, so it’s actually not a contradiction.

Debt isn’t that much of a problem if you know how to pay it off; the problem was the deficit. Because Osbourne’s “plan A” (or “non-plan”) isn’t producing the growth he required, we’re still borrowing an NHS every year, just as Labour left things; the opposite of knowing how to pay it off, we’re uncontrollably borrowing more and more!

The real problem with Labour’s borrowing wasn’t their spending post 2008. Once the debt was huge and a crash happened, they were kind of pinned – Bailing out banks, stimulus, and QE were all sensible things to do.

The real problem was the fact that they ran a boom-time deficit from 2002 onwards (the very opposite of Keynesianism) and this when the crash happened we still had a massive debt and had trouble borrowing more to fix things without taking a credit rating hit (and thus paying more interest; quite important when you have a huge debt!)

While Scameron and Gideon, playing pin the tail on the boar (ish market,) might not be doing much to help, I much prefer them (and Vince and his “plan A+”) at the helm than Milliband and Balls, who were part of the team that ruined everything in the first place, and don’t seem to have learned from it. Bring back Alistair Darling, who actually had a deficit reduction plan, and you might persuade me.

You’re right on the causes of the current problem, although the structural problems you describe were all legacies from Labour (lack of lending to businesses from the post-crash credit squeeze, etc) and while I agree with you on more redistributive tax (which thanks to the Lib Dems this government is extending (10k threshold) and maintaining (50p rate)) I don’t believe that leaving a massive deficit running, to the point where it takes the 50 years you describe to finally pay it all off, is a sustainable solution.

This century is going to be harder than the last, as we have an environmental as well as an economic crisis to fix. Burying our heads in the sand and saying “la la la” while the debt mounts won’t fix that.

“Terrorists in disguise” is apparently what China’s officials have started calling Tibetan monks (and nuns) who set themselves on fire in protest at the communists’ continued occupation of Tibet.

Terrorism, in so far as it is defined (since it’s an etymological misnomer,) is generally held to refer to an attack on a state which damages citizens or infrastructure or both.

Setting yourself on fire as an act of protest is pretty much the ultimate peaceful demonstration. I would say it’s pointless, but it was just such an action which sparked the Tunisian revolution, and this arguably the entire Arab Spring, so clearly not. However, it is still further than any protester should have to go.

Perhaps if China were to give Tibet an augmented version of the autonomous status it has conferred on many other regions, say by giving full political and economic control to a locally elected governing body, the deeply peaceful inhabitants of Tibet wouldn’t keep choosing to peacefully, if visibly, kill themselves in frustration.

Seriously, Chope? Rejecting an increase in MPs’ contribution to their own pension scheme is utterly insane.

Contributions should clearly rise, for the foreseeable future, in line with standard public sector pain, or (as the Union rep pointed out) we’re really not all in this together.

On the inconsistent point; devolving the power for the future, while specifying at least how harsh to be for now, makes perfect sense to me, dude.

MPs need to take this seriously, because if the second best enumerated public servants in the land can’t cut their own pay without a fight, then we’re in for a seriously turbulent ride to budget sanity in 2015.

I found this article this afternoon, and was appalled by the cavalier definition of Liberalism as a mission to destroy the State.

I do agree with the assertion that Liberalism is a mission to destroy privilege, however the article chooses the moat bizarre definition of privilege I have ever seen; inequalities created by the State.

Presumably these would be inequalities like the destitute being entitled to housing benefit, while millionaire bankers must pay for their own second home, or that people in job centres are entitled to state funded assistance in CV writing and interview technique, while the poor old Etonians funded to the eyeballs by their parents have to make do with the best education money can buy.

Privilege is in none of these places: it is embedded in the sharp elbows of the middle classes. It’s in the unpaid internships, which Nick Clegg, accompanied surprisingly by Louise Mench, has rightly attacked as an affront to Social Mobility, since only those who can afford to live off their savings or parents are able to buy this work experience that often catapults them into the graduate jobs market.

Now tackling unpaid internships is a nontrivial problem &em; the line between these and volunteering, without which the charitable sector would not survive, is a thin and ill-defined one. But this does not give Liberals, those enemies of privilege and vested interests, license to sit back and ignore their effect on keeping the children of the poor down!

A far higher priority must be set on removing barriers to social rising (and falling, which is the flip side of mobility) than on making sure entitlements are not abused. And no priority at all should ever be afforded by any Liberal government to cutting off the lifelines of those who depend on them; which the current government is misguidedly doing thanks to it’s Conservative, not Liberal, influence.

This version of privilege, in short, is that of the Libertarian Tories who which to see homelessness soar and children go hungry, because it is closer to an “Ideal Market”. And The Liberal Democrats, the Social Liberal Internationalist Green party that we are, will never stand for that.