No, not that ‘darling’ (I would get a big slap if I said that to Yuko)… I mean Alistair Darling.
Recently, the FT reported some rather disturbing news about the state of the North Sea Reserves.

These seem to go against what had been coming out from the goverment where

“At the beginning of the month Alistair Darling, the trade and industry secretary, declared that 2006 was the best year for new finds of oil and gas for five years”

Hmmm, I’m not convinced about this. Sure, it may have been the best for 5 years, but any finds have been tiny compared to the original finds back in the 70′s that led to the development of the North Sea fields in the first place. They surely aren’t making up the loss in production from the peaked known reserves…

“Oil and gas production in the North Sea is now expected to be about 10 per cent lower over the next few years than previously thought, according to the leading survey of the state of the industry.”

Failing our Children

Today the BBC reported (as did all the newspapers) on the terrible state the youth of the UK are in.
The government is, unsuprisingly, a bit annoyed about the bad publicity. It’s, correctly, reminding people that the data used to generate this report is from around about 1999/2000. BUT, I seriously doubt their claims that things have improved dramatically since then.

You can see the complete UNICEF report here.
Pretty telling is that, in my opinion, the countries with a very strong ‘greed is good, money, money’ attitude are the ones at the bottom, by a relatively large margin… the UK and the US.
What is a shame though is that the other country I know of with a strong ‘money is everything’ mindset, Japan, did not provide a complete set of data. Whilst I doubt Japan would have faired quite as badly as the UK and US, I have this feeling that Japan would have been in the lower third with scores similar France and Austria.
There were some quite interesting things I gleemed in the full report.

Figure 1.1 in the report shows the percentage of children in ‘poor’ households. What would be considered the most ‘capitalistic’ country, the US, had a huge score, possibly showing a real rich-poor divide in the country. Whilst the UK was next up, it was in the same scale as Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. Japan was in the ‘top’ 50% of ‘bad’ countries.

Figure 1.3b showed Japan doing particulary badly. Is this because Japanese school kids never own their own ‘educational’ resources, and are using those in the school only?? It’s a strange result that one.

Figure 1.3c showed both the UK and Japan doing badly in the ‘have less than 10 books at home’, and even worse was the US. Now, we could argue that kids in such hi-tech countries as ours no longer need books… we have the internet!!! BUT, as much as I love technology, the old fashioned written word still has a lot of appeal, and says a lot about a society. The lack of real books in the UK I think is leading to an attrocious standing of English in the UK. It’s leading to many problems in Japan, with the ability of young Japanese able to read and write ‘kanji’ getting worse year on year.

In fact, when you combine figures 1.3a, b and c, you get Figure 1.3, which shows Japanese kids being the most deprived educationally! Mind you, a least most of them are still polite, and not rude little ****s like the ones in the UK!

Figure 2.0 showed that the UK and Japan were both marginally under the average for Health and Safety, and the US and New Zealand (I was toying with going here at one stage) were rather bad.

Something caught my attention in the report (on Page 16).

National suicide rates among adolescents were considered, but the research suggests that suicide is more to be seen as a rare event related to particular circumstance than as an indicator of overall mental health among a nation’s young people.

In most countries I would agree with this, but with the current high suicide rate in Japan, this assertion may not appear to be correct in all cases.

Figure 3.1 was suprising. Considering the failing education system in the UK, it got an above average score (as did Japan, with a 100% improvement over the UK). I wonder how this data was collected?

Section 4 of the report, unsuprisingly, did not have a complete set of data for Japan. Questions such as ‘do you eat with your parents several times a week’ and ‘do you talk with your parents several times a week’ can easily be answered. This are simple matter of fact questions. Awkward questions about family relationships (step-family) and ‘opinions on peers’ were not answered by the Japanese. This seems to me at least to be typical Japanese quiet reservation.

Section 5 has an interesting chart, and one that does not tell the full story. That was 5.2f, Teenage births per 1000 15-19 year olds. Japan had the lowest score, with the US with a very high score. The problem with this statistic is that it does not take into account abortions! The abortion rate in Japan is massive! A better score would have been to include the abortion rates with the birth rate, to give a figure about careless underage sex.
Figure 5.3 was annoying because again, there were no Japanese figures… this time on bullying.

Finally, Section 6 was ‘Subjective Well-being’. Again, unsuprisingly, Japan did not have many results for this. In fact, only one question was answered… Figure 6.3b.

The table brings together the results of asking young people to agree or disagree with three statements about
themselves:
“I feel like an outsider or left out of things”. “I feel awkward and out of place”, “I feel lonely”
Overall, the responses reveal a remarkable consistency across most of the OECD countries and a high level of life satisfaction among its young people. In most nations, the proportion of young people agreeing with the statements is at the lower end of the 5% to 10% range. A higher proportion of children agreed with the statement “I feel awkward and out of place” but even here the proportion answering “yes” exceeded 10% in only 8 out of 24 OECD countries. The most striking individual result is the
30% of young people in Japan who agreed with the statement “I feel lonely” was almost three times higher than the next highest-scoring country. Either this reflects a difficulty of translating the question into a different language and culture, or a
problem meriting further investigation, or both.

Don’t mess with the IHA

Whoops, an Aussie author has annoyed the Japanese government with his book about the alleged treatment of Princess Masako.
Apparently, the Japanese goverment didn’t compain much, until it looked like the book was going to be published in Japan. So, the government thought it would try to influence the publisher in not going ahead. Hmmm, seems to have backfired, as now this story is all over the news and the PR people for the publisher and author must be rubbing their hands with glee.