Stephen Aguilar Millan

Dear Karl,
We might want to give some thought to the secondary effects of lower interest rates.
Falling interest rates are dragging down annuity rates. Just to make the point, the annuity rates determine how much you gat each month from your pension.
So we have a situation arising where the population living on retirement income is set to rise dramatically (the Boomers are reaching retirement age), just as the amount they can live off hits all time lows.
Net result – low income pensioners for...

As the real economy moves into recession, we can now see how governments around the world are responding to the crisis. In general, there has been a bail out of the banking sector around the world. This has been coupled to a loosening of monetary policy as interest rates have been aggressively reduced, along with the announcements of relatively large fiscal stimuli. We have yet to see whether this action alone will be enough to mitigate the worst effects of the incipient recession. While we...

AND …

There are these charities which are really businesses. I look forward to the application of the ‘public benefit’ rules to public schools.

If the public schools were to lose their charitable status (no appreciable public benefit), not only would Corporation Tax become an issue, but also VAT may be liable on their fees.

What would happen if this were to have a more general impact on the charity sector?

I wonder if the Third Sector is ready for the Long Tail? The Long Tail is all about disintermediation – cutting out the middleman (or woman). In a world in which the Internet enables donors to deal directly with beneficiaries, what is the compelling rationale behind the charity business model?
I would be happy to chair a roundtable on this if any others are interested.

This is quite predictable a movement. The migration cycle is about 3 to 4 years. In this time, about 85% of newcomers have achieved their financial objectives and return to their place of origin. Interestingly, there is usually a recycling of jobs, as the outgoing workers turn over their jobs to friends and relatives at ‘home’. This recycling process may be retarded in the current economic downturn, as the UK exports its unemployment abroad.

This post is just to alert members of our free weekly update.

Each week, we circulate a review that places a current topic into a wider futures perspective. We normally look deeper than the news coverage to discern the underlying trends.

Recent topics have examined the price of oil (stimulated by a thought piece that we did for the National Trust), the New Nationalism (and how that is likely to play to the flow of people), and how climate change means that Christmas might come more than once...

Dear Natalie,

What is the output of a futures exercise? Some people say that a set of scenarios might be the output that you can expect, but I think that the answer is different. I feel that a good futures project will deliver a set of questions, and those questions will relate to the critical uncertainties.

In our futures projects, we aim to devote 50% of the project to finding the right questions and then about 50% of the time to looking at where we might find the answers to those...

Dear Megan,
Have you thought about developing a 3S4 Group on Linked-In (oir an NVCO Group)?
With best wishes,
Stephen

Dear Natalie,

This is a story of time and space.

Most “official” statistics operate on an annual cycle (April to March, normally), whilst migration flows operate on a three to four year cycle.

If we view the Polish flow from this perspective, then, in 2004 when full accession to the EU came into play, there would be an apparent rush of people from Poland. However, once the population had stabilised, it would become more of a cyclical flow.

The Times report merely states that we are now in...

We also posted a meeting report on this meeting. It can be found at http://eufo.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-of-citizenship.html.

I found the meeting a bit insular (an inward focus on the UK that didn’t take in the European context) and a bit one dimensional (no real consideration of how citizenship might change if the UK loosens a bit further into devolved areas).

However, I had a good time, met some interesting people, and it gave me an interesting reality check from the real world.

I am quite pessimistic about the prospect of taking sufficient action to avoid catastrophic climate change. In terms of this discussion, we are nowhere near the tipping point.

I went to a briefing by Nick Stern on the issue of climate change and what needs to be done (see review). It left me feeling that the job is just too big.

Just suppose that The Enlightenment has ended, and that we are entering a new era. What would that look like?

We would be nostalgic about the old paradigm (democratic government, freedom of the individual, repect for private property), but increasingly aware that it is no longer relevant. If the basic building block of The Enlightenment – the nation-state – were to be dissolving, then what would replace it?

One answer is the post-modern supra-national institution, such as the EU. However,...