Why You Should Never Retire

From The Economist

In an episode of “The Sopranos”, a popular television series which started airing in the 1990s, a gangster tells Tony, from the titular family, that he wants to retire. “What are you, a hockey player?” Tony snaps back. Non-fictional non-criminals who are considering an end to their working lives need not worry about broken fingers or other bodily harm. But they must still contend with other potentially painful losses: of income, purpose or, most poignantly, relevance.

Some simply won’t quit. Giorgio Armani refuses to relinquish his role as chief executive of his fashion house at the age of 89. Being Italy’s second-richest man has not dampened his work ethic. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway, worked for the investment powerhouse until he died late last year at the age of 99. Mr Buffett himself is going strong at 93.

People like Messrs Armani, Buffett or Munger are exceptional. But in remaining professionally active into what would historically be considered dotage, they are not unique. One poll this year found that almost one in three Americans say they may never retire. The majority of the nevers said they could not afford to give up a full-time job, especially when inflation was eating into an already measly Social Security cheque. But suppose you are one of the lucky ones who can choose to step aside. Should you do it?

The arc of corporate life used to be predictable. You made your way up the career ladder, acquiring more prestige and bigger salaries at every step. Then, in your early 60s, there was a Friday-afternoon retirement party, maybe a gold watch, and that was that. The next day the world of meetings, objectives, tasks and other busyness faded. If you were moderately restless, you could play bridge or help out with the grandchildren. If you weren’t, there were crossword puzzles, tv and a blanket.

Although intellectual stimulation tends to keep depression and cognitive impairment at bay, many professionals in the technology sector retire at the earliest recommended date to make space for the younger generation, conceding it would be unrealistic to maintain their edge in the field. Still, to step down means to leave centre stage—leisure gives you all the time in the world but tends to marginalise you as you are no longer in the game.

Things have changed. Lifespans are getting longer. It is true that although the post-retirement, twilight years are stretching, they do not have to lead to boredom or to a life devoid of meaning. Once you retire after 32 years as a lawyer at the World Bank, you can begin to split your time between photography and scrounging flea markets for a collection of Americana. You don’t have to miss your job or suffer from a lack of purpose. If you are no longer head of the hospital, you can join Médecins Sans Frontières for occasional stints, teach or help out at your local clinic. Self-worth and personal growth can derive from many places, including non-profit work or mentoring others on how to set up a business.

But can anything truly replace the framework and buzz of being part of the action? You can have a packed diary devoid of deadlines, meetings and spreadsheets and flourish as a consumer of theatre matinees, art exhibitions and badminton lessons. Hobbies are all well and good for many. But for the extremely driven, they can feel pointless and even slightly embarrassing.

That is because there is depth in being useful. And excitement, even in significantly lower doses than are typical earlier in a career, can act as an anti-ageing serum. Whenever Mr Armani is told to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labour, he replies “absolutely not”. Instead he is clearly energised by being involved in the running of the business day to day, signing off on every design, document and figure.

In “Seinfeld”, another television show of the 1990s, Jerry goes to visit his parents, middle-class Americans who moved to Florida when they retired, having dinner in the afternoon. “I’m not force-feeding myself a steak at 4.30 just to save a couple of bucks!” Jerry protests. When this guest Bartleby entered the job market, she assumed that when the day came she too would be a pensioner in a pastel-coloured shirt opting for the “early-bird special”. A quarter of a century on, your 48-year-old columnist hopes to be writing for The Economist decades from now, even if she trundles to her interviews supported by a Zimmer frame; Mr Seinfeld is still going strong at 69, after all. But ask her again in 21 years.

The world’s richest countries in 2023

From The Economist

Comparing the wealth of nations is harder than you might think. Countries with lots of people tend to have bigger economies, but that does not mean that individual incomes are high. Dollar income per person is the most common metric for sorting countries into rich and poor, but it does not account for international differences in prices. Nor does it account for how many hours people have to work to earn their wage. To provide a fuller picture, The Economist has created a global rich list using the latest available data on three measures: dollar income per person, adjusted income for local prices (known as purchasing-power parity, or ppp), and income per hour worked. See where each country ranks below.

The findings show how fickle economics can be. Take America. Its gdp is by far the largest at market exchange rates. But its income per person is only the seventh highest in the world, and eighth when adjusting for local prices. When accounting for the long workdays and limited holiday, it drops to 11th. China—the world’s second-largest economy in nominal terms—comes 65th by gdp per person and 96th by hours worked. Other countries with gruesome work cultures also see big shifts: South Korea ranks 31st on our first measure and 30th on our second, but 47th on our third.

In much of western Europe the trend goes in the opposite direction: places such as Belgium, Germany and Sweden fly up the rankings when their lower prices or enviable work-life balance are taken into account. Wages in Luxembourg go the furthest in local prices. And Norway has the world’s highest average income per hour worked. (See the top 20 countries in the chart above.)

These calculations will be imprecise. ppp conversions, for example, struggle to capture differences in the quality of goods and services. Methods for calculating hours worked may differ; it is especially hard to estimate them for poor countries with large informal sectors (read our full methodology here). And the data from some countries cannot be trusted. Some countries (notably China) have very high savings rates, so even their ppp-adjusted gdp per hour will not reflect their living standards. The ranking also captures people’s average incomes (what they earn), not their assets (what they already have). But the comparison offers a more complete assessment of the world’s richest countries than a focus on any single measure—it shows where your money goes furthest, and where long hours may not always pay off.

Burnt out: is the exhausting cult of productivity finally over?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

In the US, they call it “hustle culture”: the idea that the ideal person for the modern age is one who is always on, always at work, always grafting. Your work is your life, and when you are not doing your hustle, you have a side-hustle. Like all the world’s worst ideas, it started in Silicon Valley, although it is a business-sector thing, rather than a California thing.

Since the earliest days of tech, the notion of “playbour”, work so enjoyable that it is interchangeable with leisure, has been the dream. From there, it spiralled in all directions: hobbies became something to monetise, wellness became a duty to your workplace and, most importantly, if you love your work, it follows that your colleagues are your intimates, your family.



Which is why an organisation such as Ustwo Games likes to call itself a “fampany”. “What the hell is that?” says Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back. “A lot of these companies’ websites use the word ‘family’, even though they have workers in Canada, workers in India, workers in the UK; a lot of us don’t even speak the same language and yet we’re a ‘family’.” Meanwhile, companies such as Facebook and Apple have offered egg-freezing to their employees, suggesting that you may have to defer having a real family if you work for a fake one.

A grownup soft-play area: inside the Google office in Zurich, Switzerland. Photograph: Google

The tech companies’ attitudes have migrated into other “status” sectors, together with the workplaces that look like a kind of grownup soft-play, all colourful sofas and ping-pong and hot meals. In finance, food has become such a sign of pastoral care that Goldman Sachs recently sent junior employees hampers to make up for their 100-hour working weeks. If you actually cared about your staff, surely you would say it with proper working conditions, not fruit? But there is an even dicier subtext: when what you eat becomes your boss’s business, they are buying more than your time – they are buying your whole self.

Then Elon Musk weighed in to solve that niggling problem: what’s the point of it all? Making money for someone else, with your whole life? The billionaire reorientated the nature of work: it’s not a waypoint or distraction in the quest for meaning – work is meaning. “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” he memorably tweeted, concluding that people of vision worked 80 or more, eliding industry with passion, vision, society. Say what you like about him but he knows how to build a narrative.

Hustle culture has proved to be a durable and agile creed, changing its image and language while retaining its fundamentals. Sam Baker, author of The Shift: How I (Lost and) Found Myself After 40 – And You Can Too, worked an 80-hour week most of her life, editing magazines. “The 1980s were, ‘Put on a suit and work till you drop,’” she says. “Mark Zuckerberg is, ‘Put on a grey T-shirt and work till you drop.’” The difference, she says, is that “it’s all now cloaked in a higher mission”.

What has exposed the problems with this whole structure is the pandemic. It has wreaked some uncomfortable but helpful realisations – not least that the jobs with the least financial value are the ones we most rely on. Those sectors that Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at Surrey University and author of Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, describes as “chronically underinvested for so long, neglected for so long” and with “piss-poor” wages, are the ones that civilisation depends on: care work, retail, delivery.
Elon Musk … ‘Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Many of the rest of us, meanwhile, have had to confront the nonessentiality of our jobs. Laura, 43, was working in private equity before the pandemic, but home working brought a realisation. Being apart from colleagues and only interacting remotely “distilled the job into the work rather than the emotions being part of something”. Not many jobs can take such harsh lighting. “It was all about making profit, and focusing on people who only care about the bottom line. I knew that. I’ve done it for 20-odd years. I just didn’t want to do it any more.”

Throw in some volunteering – which more than 12 million people have during the pandemic – and the scales dropped from her eyes. She ended up giving up her job to be a vaccination volunteer. She can afford to live on her savings for now, and as for what happens when the money runs out, she will cross that bridge when she comes to it. The four pillars of survival, on leaving work, are savings, spouses, downsizing and extreme thrift; generally speaking, people are happiest talking about the thrift and least happy talking about the savings.

Charlotte White, 47, had a similar revelation. She gave up a 20-plus-year career in advertising to volunteer at a food bank. “I felt so needed. This sounds very selfish but I have to admit that I’ve got a lot out of it. It’s the opposite of the advertising bullshit. I’d end each day thinking: ‘My God, I’ve really helped someone.’ I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for years, and there are all these people I’ve never met: older people, younger people, homeless people.”

With the spectre of mortality hovering insistently over every aspect of life, it is not surprising that people had their priorities upended. Neal, 50, lost his job as an accountant in January 2020. He started applying for jobs in the same field. “I was into three figures; my hit rate was something like one interview for 25. I think I was so uninterested that it was coming across in my application. I was pretending to be interested in spreadsheets and ledgers when thousands of people were dying, and it just did not sit right.” He is now working in a psychiatric intensive care unit, earning just above the minimum wage, and says: “I should have done it decades ago. I’m a much better support worker than I ever was an accountant.”

This is a constant motif: everybody mentions spreadsheets; everyone wishes they had made the change decades ago. “For nine months, my partner and I existed on universal credit,” Neal says, “and that was it. It was tough, we had to make adjustments, pay things later, smooth things out. But I thought: ‘If we can exist on that …’”
The tyranny of work … Could change be its own reward? Photograph: Bob Scott/Getty Images

So why have we been swallowing these notions about work and value that were nonsense to begin with, and just getting sillier? We have known that the “higher mission” idea, whether it was emotional (being in a company that refers to itself as a “family”) or revolutionary (being “on” all the time in order to change the world) was, as Baker puts it “just fake, just another way of getting people to work 24 hours a day. It combined with the email culture, of always being available. I remember when I got my BlackBerry, I was working for Cosmopolitan, it was the best thing ever … It was only a matter of months before I was doing emails on holiday.”

But a lot of status came with feeling so indispensable. Unemployment is a famous driver of misery, and overemployment, to be so needed, can feel very bolstering. Many people describe having been anxious about the loss of status before they left their jobs; more anxious than about the money, where you can at least count what you are likely to have and plan around it. As Laura puts it, “not being on a ladder any more, not being in a race: there is something in life, you should always be moving forward, always going up”. And, when it came to it, other people didn’t see them as diminished.

Katherine Trebeck, of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, is keen to broaden the focus of the productivity conversation. “To be able to have the choice, to design your own goals for your own life, to develop your own sense of where you get status and esteem is a huge privilege; there’s a socio-economic gradient associated with that level of autonomy,” she says. In other words: you have to have a certain level of financial security before your own emotional needs are at all relevant.

“When I was at Oxfam, we worked with young mothers experiencing poverty,” Trebeck says. “Just the pressure to shield their kids from looking poor made them skimp on the food they were providing. Society was forcing them to take those decisions between hunger and stigma.” She is sceptical about individual solutions and is much more focused on system change. Whether we are at the bottom or in the middle of this ladder, we are all part of the same story.

Part of the scam of the productivity narrative is to separate us, so that the “unskilled” are voiceless, discredited by their lack of skill, while the “skilled” don’t have anything to complain about because if they want to know what’s tough, they should try being unskilled. But in reality we are very interconnected – especially if working in the public sector – and you can burn out just by seeing too closely what is going on with other people.

Pam, 50, moved with her husband from London to the Peak District. They were both educationalists, he a headteacher, she in special educational needs (SEN). She describes what drove their decision: “If you think about a school, it’s a microcosm of life, and there have been very limited resources. Certainly in SEN, the lack of funding was desperate. Some kids just go through absolute hell: trying to get a CAMHS [Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services] appointment is nigh on impossible, kids have to be literally suicidal for someone to say: ‘OK, we’ll see you in two months.’”

They moved before the pandemic, and she found a part-time job with the National Trust, before lockdown forced a restructure. She hopes to resume working in the heritage sector when it reopens. Her husband still does some consultancy, but the bedrock of their security, financially speaking, is that the move out of London allowed them to “annihilate the mortgage”.
A rewarding alternative … volunteers working at a foodbank in Earlsfield, south London. Photograph: Charlotte White/PA

Creative and academic work, putatively so different from profit-driven sectors, nevertheless exploits its employees using, if anything, a heightened version of the same narrative: if what you do is who you are, then you’re incredibly lucky to be doing this thoughtful/artistic thing, and really, you should be paying us. Elizabeth, 39, was a performer, then worked in a theatre. “My eldest sister used to be an archaeologist, and that sounds different, but it’s the same: another job where they want you to be incredibly credentialed, incredibly passionate. But they still want to pay you minimum wage and God forbid you have a baby.”

There is also what the management consultants would call an opportunity cost, of letting work dominate your sense of who you are. You could go a whole life thinking your thing was maths, when actually it was empathy. I asked everyone if they had any regrets about their careerist years. Baker said: “Are you asking if I wish I’d had children? That’s what people usually mean when they ask that.” It actually wasn’t what I meant: whether you have children or not, the sense of what you have lost to hyperproductivity is more ineffable, that there was a better person inside you that never saw daylight.

When the furlough scheme came in, Jennifer, 39, an academic, leapt at the opportunity to cut her hours without sacrificing any pay. “I thought there’d be a stampede, but I was the only one.” She makes this elegant observation: “The difference between trying 110% and trying 80% is often not that big to other people.”

If the past year has made us rethink what skill means, upturn our notions of the value we bring to the world around us, fall out of love with our employers and question productivity in its every particular, as an individual goal as well as a social one, well, this, as the young people say, could be quite major. Certainly, I would like to see Elon Musk try to rebut this new consciousness in a tweet.

Economics for Non Economists 3 – Explaining GDP and Economic Growth

By Girish Menon

Introduction

You will have recently read:

-     At 13%, Economist Intelligence Unit Pegs India's Growth In 2021 Higher Than IMF

-    Western economies recovering faster than expected from Covid, says IMF

 -   UK GDP rose 0.4% in February

 -  China's economy grows 18.3% in post-Covid comeback

 

What does this mean?

Just like the Forbes magazine compiles an annual list of the richest individuals on planet earth, most countries participate in an annual ‘show of wealth’. The most commonly used measure in this competition is called GDP. At the end of 2019 the top six countries were:

Table 1

Country	GDP ($ trillions)	Economic growth over previous year (%)	Per Capita GDP ($)	Share of World GDP (%)
USA	19.5	2.2	59, 939	24
China	12.2	6.9	8,612	15
Japan	4.9	1.7	38,214	6
Germany	3.7	2.2	44,680	4.5
India	2.7	6.7	1,980	3.28
UK	2.6	1.8	39.532	3,26

SourceWorldometers

What do these terms mean?

Simply defined, GDP or Gross Domestic Product is the money value of all goods and services (goods) produced within an economy in a period of time. In Table 1 the GDP is estimated over the year of 2019. The data quoted in the introduction compares GDP changes over the first two quarters of 2020.

Economic growth is a measure of the additional goods produced by an economy over the last period of time  (say a year or a quarter).

Per Capita GDP means the value of goods each resident would get if all goods produced in an economy is shared equally. This is calculated by dividing the GDP with the residents of the country. Do you think per capita GDP is an accurate description of how goods are actually distributed in an economy?

Share of World GDP means the share of global goods produced by an economy. This is calculated by dividing each country’s GDP with the whole world’s total GDP.

Why is GDP and the rate of Economic growth so important?

Materialism is the underlying principle of using GDP and economic growth as the most important indicator of economic performance. Materialism, according to the Cambridge English Dictionary, is the belief that having money and possessions is the most important thing in life. It follows that as one’s material goods increases one’s standard of living (happiness) tends to increase.

GDP is a tool that measures the volume of material goods produced by an economy. A high rate of economic growth demonstrates the rate at which the material goods in an economy is increasing and as a result the happiness of the residents as well. So, when the rate of economic growth becomes negative, as in the data mentioned in the introduction, it follows that your happiness will decrease.

Are GDP and GNP the same?

They are similar but not the same. GDP measures the volume of goods produced by people living within the boundaries of an economy. The output of Nissan’s Sunderland plant will be included in UK’s GDP. In other words the output of Britons and foreign nationals living in the UK will be added to calculate UK’s GDP.

GNP stands for Gross National Product. It is a measure of the volume of goods produced by British nationals living in the UK and outside. It will exclude the output of foreign nationals (say Nissan Sunderland) operating within the British economy.

Is GDP an accurate measure of the volume of goods produced within an economy?

The answer is No. The calculation is arduous and with questionable assumptions which I will not go into here. I will however mention some weaknesses here:

1. Even though there are some standardised procedures for its computation governments are known to deliberately intervene in its methodology and computation.

2.   Not all goods are included. For example if you clean your own house and look after your family – these services are not included. However, if you employ a cleaner, a cook, a nanny and a driver then their services are included.

3.   In some countries where there is a large informal economy. The goods produced by such activities are not be included in GDP computations.

Does an increase in GDP necessarily improve residents’ happiness?

In economics, happiness is better known as welfare.

If there is an earthquake in your country and many roads, buildings, bridges, stadia are destroyed. Then rebuilding them will increase the national GDP but has it improved the citizens’ welfare?

As a resultant of economic growth the quality of air you breathe has gone down and the water supply is polluted. Has this improved your standard of living?

Due to increased standard of living everybody has a car and you are now required to spend one hour extra in commuting time. Has this resulted in improved happiness?

What is the prognosis for GDP and economic growth?

It appears that due to Covid-19 the GDP of most nations will be lower than in 2019. These economies will have negative economic growth which means that in 2020 they will produce fewer goods than in 2019.

When the GDP falls, the terms most used are recession and depression. The difference between the two according to Harry Truman is ‘It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours’ .

As you have seen in the news, firms are busy firing staff which means there will be increased unemployment. Since more people are unemployed they will not have money to buy goods in the future and so there will be even less demand for goods in the future and those who have jobs today may lose their jobs next year in a downward spiral of negative economic growth begetting even more negative growth.

Will there be lower emphasis on GDP and economic growth in the future? For such a change to happen there needs a material change in organising the world economy. (If you wish to read further click here)

I hope it happens in my lifetime.

* - annualised rate

---Also watch

How the Economic Machine Works by Ray Dallio

The agony of returning to work in September

Janan Ganesh in The FT 

For eight improbable years, TS Eliot earned his crust as a clerk for Lloyds Bank. He did not have the excuse of ignorance, therefore, when he misidentified April as the “cruelest month”. All working people know the real ogre to be September. Millions of us are winding down our summer holidays around now and answering the call of necessary employment. 

I enjoy my job to an almost indecent degree. Yet even I felt a pang as I flew out of Perugia recently and into my nine-to-five (or, if you must, my eleven-to-two). La rentrée is all the harsher on people with proper jobs. 

The sour atmosphere in airport departure lounges does at least clarify something. The search for pleasure and meaning in work is, beyond a certain point, a fool’s errand. No doubt, some jobs are better than others. But as long as work is an obligation — something one must do, to uphold a standard of living — there is a limit to the joy it can ever bring. Leisure will always feel better, and by a margin that is unbridgeable with worker-friendly offices and other blandishments. 

I started my career just before any of this needed saying. But then the promise began to emerge of work that need not feel like work. Companies vied to lay on the most ergonomic environments, the kindest mentors, the loosest schedules. A generation of in-demand graduates came to expect not just these material incentives but a sort of credal alignment with their employer’s “values”. The next recession will retard this trend but it is unlikely to kill it. 

All of this is as it should be. I was raised by people who had to toil without any of these perks. I don’t romanticise it as an era of Spartan virtue. Whatever companies do to nudge their staff up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is to be saluted. 


The perk to really haggle for is not in-job comfort but the maximisation of paid leave. 


 It is just that the kindest service we can do for the young is manage their expectations. Work can be made a lot better than it might otherwise be. It cannot be made to be something other than work. The idea is taking hold, I sense, that it is odd to do something that is not exactly what you would wish to be doing at a particular moment. But this is the lot of even the most “creative” worker, the most self-governing entrepreneur. Very few professional tasks are so absorbing as to be one’s first-choice pursuit in circumstances of total freedom. 

A personal ambition is to reach the end of my career without having managed a single person. Friends who have been less lucky, who have whole teams under their watch, report a quirk among their younger charges. It is not laziness or obstreperousness or those other millennial slanders. It is an air of disappointment with the reality of working life. They will be among the people described in Bullshit Jobs by the anthropologist David Graeber. They will not be among the mere 18 per cent who told YouGov in 2015 that work was “very fulfilling”. As much as the fogey in me blames their entitlement, they were promised more than was plausible by company brochures and a culture that pretends an office can feel like something else. 

Companies are only able to soften the experience of employment so much. What they cannot finesse out of existence is the crux: the surrender of time for money that you would ideally fill with something else. The perk to really haggle for, then, is not in-work comfort but the maximisation of paid leave. 

Twenty years have passed since Office Space, and the cult film remains the acutest satire of alienating employment. In the central scene, workers do to an eternally malfunctioning printer more or less what liberated Iraqis did to statues of Saddam Hussein. 

It has one dud note, though, and it comes at the end, when the main character quits his office cubicle for life as a construction worker. The message is that manual labour does not have its own kind of soul-sucking boredom and pressure. It takes a cocooned sort to believe this kind of thing, but lots of people believe it of careers other than their own. The simplest jobs and the most cerebral are both heroised. But the defining thing about work is not its exact content. It is the fact that you have to do it. Look around at the faces in the departure lounge. In a stratified labour force, a rare unifier is dread of the cruelest month.

Fixing Britain's work ethic is not the answer to this economic mess

It suits the Tory austerity narrative to blame 'idle' Britons for the recession rather than flaws in the modern labour market

• 
• • Gaby Hinsliff
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 August 2012 17.00 BST

A new book by five Tory MPs has accused Britons as being among the worst idlers in the world. Photograph: Erik Dreyer/Getty

Well, that didn't last long, did it? The victory parades have barely begun, and already the midsummer dream is rudely shattered. No more talk of herculean efforts to win gold, no more hammering of iron rings of fire, no more warm fuzzy feelings towards our national broadcaster.

No, it's back to being depicted as a nation of slack-jawed lummoxes incapable of a decent day's work, and to Iain Duncan Smith accusing the BBC's economics editor Stephanie Flanders of "peeing all over British industry", after she failed to greet falling unemployment figures with unquestioning wonderment. So much for the legacy.

In fairness to the five Tory MPs who first pricked the bubble, via leaked excerpts from their forthcoming book arguing that we're not the nation of champions we had giddily begun imagining but "among the worst idlers of the world", this wasn't quite the plan.

Perhaps provocative references in Britannia Unchained to people preferring "a lie in to hard work" will look less inflammatory in context, or at least in season (the book's due out in September, traditional month of noses back to grindstones and party conference tub-thumping). But still, the politics of idleness deserves unpicking.

Here's a test: does the word "idle", when used by politicians, instinctively set alarm bells ringing? If so, you're probably left of centre, because it's an indisputably Tory buzzword – reeking of Norman Tebbit's father getting on his bike and rightwing tabloids haranguing welfare "scroungers", stirring in leftwing breasts the old fear of attack on the vulnerable.

But if it's that word "vulnerable" which gets your hackles up then you're probably right of centre, because vulnerability is a Labour buzzword – reeking for you of excuses to do nothing, of lily-livered bleating about why the welfare state couldn't possibly be reformed which ultimately traps those it purports to protect. You probably cheered when Eric Pickles ditched the term "vulnerable families" (Whitehall speak for impoverished families with multiple social problems) for "problem families", saying it was time to stop making excuses. For the right, the word "vulnerable" smacks of victimhood, of ducking blame and not holding individuals accountable for their actions.

Because that's really the difference between "vulnerable" and "idle". The first suggests that being broke or desperate is at least partly to do with external circumstances, which may need help to overcome; the second suggests it's your own dumb fault. "Vulnerable" resonates for those who believe in the transformative power of the state; "idle" for those who believe in the power of individuals.

And what's giving the politics of idleness a new lease of life is the marriage of an ancient Tory belief – that anyone can haul themselves up by their bootstraps, that failure means you're not trying hard enough – with a newly fashionable argument about the decline of the decadent west and rise of the industrious east.

The young Tory turks are busy weaving a narrative not just of individual moral failing (too many workshy scroungers) but of national degeneration: a sense that we've been spoiled by years of easy money and need a collective kick up the backside. It's intimately connected to austerity politics, with its inference that only rich countries can afford to go this soft.

The idea that developed nations have grown fat and lazy with prosperity, and that only the children of hungry tiger economies still understand the value of hard graft, is quietly embedding itself in political culture. Think Michael Gove raiding Singapore's education system for ideas on toughening up exams; or even the Indian steel magnate Ratan Tata, complaining last year that his company's western workers were overfond of their leisure and blaming "a certain comfort level that comes from a country that has had good times". (Tata is shortly to retire but says at 75 his life's work won't be done, a sentiment of which the Britannia Unchained quintet would doubtless approve.)

It's not clear yet exactly who these pampered slackers supposedly dragging Britain down are, beyond familiar vague complaints of a bloated public sector and kids "more interested in pop music and football" than in becoming lawyers. Perhaps inevitably, they exist now more in the realm of anecdote – the intern who thinks she's above making the coffee, young men scorning the menial jobs subsequently snapped up by immigrants – than hard fact.

And while Britain does, as the book's authors say, have unusually short average working hours, that's mainly because we have an unusually high percentage of part-timers, many of whom want fulltime work but can't find it. (Those working fulltime still do some of the longest hours in Europe.) Perhaps all those frantically juggling part-time mothers of small children – the ones who a generation ago wouldn't have worked at all – are to be deemed lazy? But there's a bigger problem with the politics of idleness than quibbling over definitions.

Hauling ourselves out of recession might indeed be as easy as demanding everyone pull their socks up, if declining GDP really was just a fancy name for indolence.

But the many dull technical reasons why value of output per worker might fall – from the shrinking of highly productive sectors like the City to the rise of self-employed freelances commanding a lower hourly rate than they did as staffers – aren't solved by simply clocking up more hours. Our challenges are not those of tiger economies, suggesting their recipe of working harder for longer for less won't necessarily work miracles here.

Yet for exploring this complicated new reality in her Newsnight report, Flanders was accused by the work and pensions secretary of "carping and moaning", running down an "incredibly robust" private sector. It's apparently fine to call individuals lazy, but not to suggest any flaw in modern labour markets.

And perhaps that's partly because doing the latter suggests we may be vulnerable (that word again) to global economic trends beyond our immediate control – trends not so easily reversed by the classic Tory formula now being touted for unleashing our inner tiger, namely slashing employment regulations and cutting benefits. Idle, or vulnerable? The story we believe about ourselves has wider implications than we think.