The “perfect storm” facing the Church of England Pensions Board as it seeks to fund retirement housing should be addressed by drawing on the Church Commissioners’ assets, two clergy bodies argued this week.

The Pensions Board’s “Enabling Choice” consultation warns that the current provision — the CHARM scheme, which enables clergy to rent a property from the Board — has become unsustainable (News, 17 November 2023, 24 November 2023). Its chair, Clive Mather, has referred to a dramatic rise in costs through inflation and interest rates. Demand was said to be “unprecedented” last year (Features, 28 July 2023, News, 13 October 2023).

In its response to the consultation, which ended on Wednesday, the Retired Clergy Association of the Church of England and the Church of England Employee and Clergy Advocates, part of the Faith Workers Branch of Unite, write that the Board’s proposals “represent a radical break in the covenant of care between the Church of England and its clergy as to how they will be supported in retirement . . . bringing fresh uncertainty and anxiety to those clergy who have no other viable means of securing housing in retirement, and fuelling the broader perception among clergy that their ministry is no longer understood or valued by the institutional Church”.

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The “perfect storm” facing the Church of England Pensions Board as it seeks to fund retirement housing should be addressed by drawing on the Church Commissioners’ assets, two clergy bodies argued this week https://t.co/0XqivC2EP6

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 31, 2024

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the US deficit is swelling to a point that it would take a miracle to reverse the damage.

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he said Monday night at an event for Universa Investments, the hedge fund firm he advises. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Taleb defined the ballooning debt load as a “white swan,” a risk that’s more probable than a surprise “black swan” event. While he didn’t identify specific outcomes in markets, he did say white swans include both the US deficit and an economy that’s far more vulnerable to shocks than in prior years.

The reason for that, he said, is that the world is far more interconnected due to globalization, with issues in one region able to ricochet around the world.

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Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says as long as you have a government continually extending the debt limit and doing deals because they're afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, then eventually you're going to have a debt spiral. https://t.co/pQFrtVNqus

— Ben Woodward, CFA (@BennettWoodman) January 31, 2024

TP: What about in the decade ahead, what is a best- and worse-case scenario for how the world might look with gen AI?

EB: The pessimistic scenario is not so much about stagnation. It’s more that the nefarious uses of it will catch us off guard, whether that is weaponising them or through information warfare and abuse. The unknown unknowns. We are into uncharted territory where we have technologies that are much more powerful than before, and history suggests that often the biggest effects are ones that no one anticipated. On the optimistic side, we could start seeing significant productivity growth in the 2020s. We will see new kinds of creative work, scientific progress, industrial designs and new products and services being invented.

TP: A key determinant of which of those two paths we will be closer to are the laws, norms and institutions we develop around gen AI. How optimistic are you that we can get that right?

EB: I would not assume that everything is automatically going to work out fine. I think these are super-powerful technologies and we should have our eyes open, and be quite careful about how we use them. If they’re used right, this could be the best decade in human history. If they’re used badly, it could be one of the worst. So there’s a real premium on smart governance, managers and policymakers really paying attention to this technology. We should not fly blind. 

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Excellent stimulating exchange on gen-AI's potential, between @erikbryn and @tejparikh90: ‘On the productivity side, I think 2024 is going to be a year of harvesting a lot of the capabilities’ https://t.co/UJlksthtFo via @ft

— Andrew Hill (@andrewtghill) January 31, 2024

For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to recount her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan’s train station to the death camps of Auschwitz. Her plain-spoken testimony about gas chambers, tattooed arms, casual atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers not to remember.

Now she is wondering if it was all wasted breath.

“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation? For whom? Why?” Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a steel-cage memory and an official status as a Senator for Life said last week in her handsome Milan apartment, where she sat next to a police escort. She wondered, not for the first time these days, if “I’ve lived in vain.”

Even as Ms. Segre accepted another honorary degree on Saturday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, rising anti-Semitism and what she considers a general climate of hate have put her in a pessimistic mood.

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“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation?” Liliana Segre, 93, an Italian Holocaust survivor, says the rise in antisemitism has made her wonder these days if “I’ve lived in vain.” https://t.co/u9hfj0292B

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 31, 2024

O God, who dost satisfy the longing soul and fillest the hungry with good things: Grant that we, like thy servant Marcella, may hunger and thirst after thee above the vain pomp and glory of the world, and delight in thy word above all manner of riches; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God world without end. Amen.

O God, Who requirest that we should seek Thee and makest us to find Thee, and openest to us when we knock: O God, from Whom to be averted is to fall, and to Whom to be turned is to rise; in Whom to abide is to be established: O God, Whom to know is to live, Whom to serve is to reign; I praise Thee, I bless Thee, I adore Thee, my God.

–Frederick B. Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful; and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the first-born might not touch them.

By faith the people crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land; but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given friendly welcome to the spies.

—Hebrews 11:23-31