This article was published on LabourList on 2nd August 2011. Immigration, by being freighted with so many unsaid and often unconsidered subtexts, is a toxic subject. As both Marc Stears and Anthony Painter have suggested on LabourList recently, it certainly seems to have poisoned the ‘Blue Labour’ project, possibly fatally.
Category: Economics
This is an essay on the approach to economics suggested by Maurice Glasman’s essay ‘Labour as a Radical Tradition’. Glasman’s essay forms part of the ebook ‘The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox’. I’m not particularly keen on the ‘Blue Labour’ moniker, but the ideas behind Maurice Glasman’s approach bear serious examination. Interestingly, his […]
My last blog claimed that equilibrium economics is a fig-leaf for the rich and powerful – because it is a justification for preserving the status quo. But it is more than that, because the conditions required for reaching any such equilibrium (the point at which prices of goods and services have adjusted so that everyone […]
What is economics for? It’s often characterised as being about the choice between ‘guns or butter’. This choice is one not only about which we want to consume, but also about which we want to produce. Strangely, the dominant neoclassical paradigm attempts to render this a choice that need not be made, since it proposes […]
The lesson of the New Labour years that ended in the biggest global economic crisis since the 1930s is a simple one. ‘Shareholder value’ capitalism is a beast that cannot be made to serve social democratic purposes. By social democratic purposes, I mean those that see harm done to one citizen as harm done to […]
Published on Left Foot Forward on October 5th Under the coalition’s planned NHS reforms GPs could find themselves with a serious headache. Patients armed with detailed outcome data and on-line hospital reviews may enter a GP’s surgery demanding referral to a named specialist at a hospital in another part of the country. The patient-choice imperative […]
This post was published on LabourList on 13th September 2010. The TUC conference starts today, and union leaders are declaring war on the coalition’s deficit-reduction strategy. Although some union leaders are talking about ‘civil disobedience’ campaigns and co-ordinated strikes, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber is taking a more cautious and constructive line. He wants a […]
The 2001 winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, was in Edinburgh last week to give two talks as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He is a pioneer of the economics of information, showing how markets can produce unexpected outcomes because information is […]
Fine article from the father of real-world economics on the New Economics Foundation Blog. He counters the mainstream faith in ‘endless growth’ by using economic analysis, but applied to the eco-system as a whole rather than just the narrowly economic system. The new economic question is: are the extra benefits of physically transforming more of […]
As I have mentioned in previous posts, I have been having some interesting discussions on the Chris Martenson Crash Course website. Chris wasn’t very pleased with me because I (presumably quite effectively) challenged one of his core tenets – that the monetary system is intrinsically doomed. In his post asking me never to darken his […]