Davos Newbies

A Fistful of Euros: “Last week the Italian government finally decided to delay the launch of its private pension reform by two years, by taking the decision to implement the reform in 2008 rather the originally planned 2006. As many cynics might note, this is conveniently after the forthcoming general election next spring. The reform also was intended to raise the retirement rate for government employees from 57 to 60. This gives a measure of the extent of the problem. The UK and Germany are both currently discussing raising retirement ages to at least 67.”

On a completely incidental note spurred by the discussion of pensions, one aspect of Britain that I still find odd to the point of absurdity is the honours system. In my Davos days I had many interesting discussions with Adair Turner. He led the recent pensions report in the UK, but I see he’s now styled Lord Turner. Now few people deserve recognition more, and I’m sure his counsel is needed in the House of Lords, but aren’t we in the twenty-first century?

The other day I wrote about Tom Friedman’s ridiculous comment that no one had invented podcasting. I also wrote a letter to the editor of the FT pointing out the false statement.

I’m not surprised that my letter hasn’t run. The FT has extraordinarily little space for letters. Of course, they could be unconstrained for space on FT.com, but the site is so pitifully run compared to the hard copy newspaper that I suspect it never occurred to anyone at the paper they they could do something different with the website.

What’s less understandable is the uncorrected article. The paper has had plenty of time to append a note to the interview with Friedman correcting his nonsense. As commenters on my blog post have pointed out, it’s even worse. Friedman talks about podcasting, claiming his “podcast” was number one on iTunes. But there is no Friedman podcast. It’s an audiobook, which is a very different thing.

A Google search for Thomas Airmiles Friedman will find a lot of this sort of thing. I’m pretty sure the term originated with Daniel Davies of d-squared digest and Crooked Timber.