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As a spin-off from #defenduss, Martin O’Neill circulated this report by a US thinktank, which demonstrates that final-salary pensions are actually cheaper to provide than the defined-contribution sort. The point is simple, but far from trivial – as Max Sawicky is fond of saying about US Social Security, a defined-benefit system is insurance, not mere…

Read More the wider relevance of #defenduss. defined contribution is the new sugar

A bit more #defenduss blogging. Imperial College, that most monopoly-minded of schools, has come out against the USS valuation and the EPF proposals. And it’s come out swinging, too – check out the statement here. We are disappointed that you appear to be focused on trying to fit your current proposed benefit solution to the…

Read More Imperial turns on the EPF – #defenduss news

Reader Simon Hinrichsen’s MSc thesis on the Bank of England in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is here. He argues that the UK paid for the war by borrowing as much as France, but on better terms, and by printing much more money, but it also succeeded in keeping inflation lower and more stable. Inflation…

Read More How transparency met total corruption and they beat Napoleon

Via Mike Otsuka on Facebook, here is a very important document for the future of USS and for UK pensions more broadly. A group of eminent statisticians, mathematicians, and economists have prepared a detailed critique of the USS valuation methodology, highlighting the points made here, as a letter to the USS Trustee. They argue that…

Read More #defenduss document alert: action this day

A technology thing. I am getting increasingly annoyed with the process of getting notes I take on a Kindle back out of the device and into posts on this blog. The problems are numerous, but: Notes aren’t returned with any context Notes aren’t available in a sensible format The web page they show up on…

Read More #lazyweb: my notes are trapped in a Kindle.

Here’s an astonishing piece of journalism from last weekend’s Labour mini-crisis. Daniel Boffy, The Obscurer‘s policy editor tells us: Even more significantly, this newspaper has learned that 20 Labour frontbenchers have indicated they are “actively considering Ed Miliband’s future”. The information came from a senior Labour MP who last week canvassed the parliamentary Labour party…

Read More Forget letters from 20 MPs. Remember Scotland

Mark Pack has a very good post up on how the Lib Dems’ distinctive approach to campaigning evolved, and what that meant for the party. Essentially, since the 1980s, the party was reshaped entirely around one particular technique: direct mail. I didn’t know that the LDs’ identification of target seats isn’t, or isn’t just, based…

Read More stuffing envelopes and getting stuffed