Knotty Problems

The UK home rental market is dysfunctional, taking an absurd proportion of the income of tenants and making their lives precarious, insecure, antagonistic and stress-ridden; or the rental market is balanced in favour of unscrupulous tenants who occupy properties without reliably paying rent and eventually quit them in a poor state of repair, without any recompense for the landlord?

It is unsustainable to provide retired people with pensions out of current national income - placing the burden of supporting a growing population of old people on a shrinking proportion of working people. This is even more problematic in a country that has proven itself incapable of long-term economic growth. Or, it is unrealistic to expect most people to provide for their own retirement by investing sufficient money from their income into financial products and then managing their own portfolio for 50 years or more: in a civilised, modern society the provision of security in old age is a function of the state? 

In practice, most companies function well for all their stakeholders, and include a long-term ethical and social responsibility dimension in their decision making; or the limited-liability company has a single objective driving its actions: the maximisation of profit and return to shareholders. Executives and directors are incentivised towards this single aim, and the exploitation of the workforce, the harsh treatment of suppliers and the deceipt of customers are all the inevitable consequences of the current model of shareholder capitalism? 

The abandonment of 'nutrient neutrality' regulations are an example of a government providing favours to a sector that supplies 10% of conservative party funding; or nutrient nuetrality is a bureaucratic nightmare that is irrelevant to a majority of development projects and frequently has unintended, undesirable consequences in others, without achieving significant environmental benefits in most cases? 

The biosphere is in crisis, with a catastrophic fall in the population of insects, birds and biodiversity. Pesticides are one significant cause of the problem and we have to restrict their use to safeguard the future of the natural world. Or, we have to feed 70 million people (or 8 billion, globally) and it is not feasible to do that without impacting the environment; the alternative is mass starvation. There are always improvements and safeguards that can and should be applied, but it is not possible to wind the clock back to a pre-pesticide era of low yields as the global population approaches its peak? 

Its amazing how many topics you can cover in a short walk with friends along the river Allen. We did agree at the end that we had not solved many of the world's problems, but we enjoyed the brown, peaty water, the towering, mature trees we could walk through and the relics of the industrial past, reminding us that times change