After defeat at the 2015 UK election Labour talks about appealing to the ‘aspirational’ and David Cameron pledges before his cabinet ‘to give everyone in our country the chance to get on’. If we accept the premise that speaking to material self-interest is what politics is now all about, we still need to point out […]
Politics and Morality – Where Conservatism gets it Wrong Tim Montgomerie wrote an interesting piece a while ago on ‘How the Left went Bad’, which asserted the necessity for Conservatives to ‘take the moral high ground’ from Labour. Now, I don’t think talking about ‘morality’ gets us very far in politics – different morals are […]
Response to Smaller, Greener Banking: Banking for Sustainability in a New Scotland: A Discussion Paper by Ray Perman and Friends of the Earth Scotland The authors of this report claim that ‘there has been a failure of government policy to decide the role banks should play, and therefore what sort of institutions they should be.’ […]
A Review of ‘Chasing Goldman Sachs: How the Masters of the Universe Melted Wall Street Down…and Why They’ll Take Us to the Brink Again’ by Suzanne McGee (2010, Crown Business) This book is an excellent complement to the academic stuff I’ve read on the causes of the financial crisis. These latter accounts are very detailed […]
Understanding Money – a non-technical account of the essential role money and its creation plays in a modern economy. This article was previously available as a pdf, but I have now posted it as a blog in its own right. Since it was originally written in 2010, I have made a few revisions and additions. Introduction […]
‘Aggregate Demand, Idle Time, and Unemployment’ – A Critique of Michaillat and Saez Introduction Like all neoclassical models, that of Michaillat and Saez (2014) referred to in Simon Wren-Lewis’s Mainly Macro blog on 16th August fails to model money realistically. This renders their model incoherent and in any case incapable of encompassing one of the […]
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Independence is Nominal
Independence is Nominal – long-gestated thoughts given birth to in response to Brian Barder’s blog post on the lack of post Scottish referendum preparedness and the need for the UK coalition government to resign if there is a ‘Yes’ vote. Here I am, up in Scotland and strangely detached from the debate. (For comparison I […]
‘Modern Thinking: Atomism and Communication’ – Although written four years ago for an essay competition, I still think this piece encapsulates as well as anything my approach to economics, politics and social institutions. Bertrand Russell, the great British mathematician and philosopher, believed that to be ‘modern-minded’ was to make the error of thinking with the […]
The causes of unemployment make it a moral issue. Radical solutions are required. In an earlier post I noted some features of unemployment from a UK perspective. The main thrust was that a fairly constant proportion of the population in employment (around 72% of those of working-age) hides a serious decline in the availability of […]
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The Callousness of a Conservative
Charles Moore is the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and an Old Etonian. He has nicely epitomised the indifference, evident intentional ignorance and convenient innumeracy of a particular type of Conservative. Writing in his column in ‘The Spectator’ magazine (May 4th) he devotes a mere 262 words to writing-off […]