The UK’s Public Service Crisis There is a crisis in public services in the UK. This is longstanding but has been cruelly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis is affecting education, legal services, social support and social care, but it is most obvious and most disturbing in the provision of healthcare. Emergency services are […]
What do we know about Labour’s economic approach under Keir Starmer? In his Fabian Society pamphlet ‘The Road Ahead’, and in his Labour Conference speech we are beginning to get some clues to the Economics of Starmerism. So can he rise above the prevailing ‘mediamacro’ economic fallacies so dear to the mainstream media and the […]
Last year a strange bit of ‘neoliberal’ propaganda surfaced in the New Scientist of all places. In what purported to be a report of recent research, Washington University psychologist Pascal Boyer has written of how the ‘human mind is designed to misunderstand the mass-market economies we have created’. He says ‘evidence from psychology and anthropology…reveals […]
Canadian economist and central banker David Andolfatto recently constructed a model intended to ‘reconcile’ (or I think more accurately to distinguish between) ‘mainstream’ and ‘heterodox’ views of the macroeconomic importance of money and banking. More specifically, he wants to answer the question: does the ability of banks to ‘create money’ when they issue loans give […]
Why do I consider myself to be of the ‘left’ rather than the ‘right’, despite the tendency for each term to be converted to a straw-man for all the pet hates of those attaching to the opposing label? For me, to be of the left designates a prioritisation of co-operation over competition. It is to […]
Launched in 2009, and of wider interest since 2013, the ‘cryptocurrency’ Bitcoin has seen both a rise in its value in relation to existing national and supranational currencies, and in the discussion of its forming a partial or even complete replacement to those currencies. This article outlines the nature of Bitcoin and of traditional currencies […]
Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”, published in 2014, played an important role in directing attention to the issue of inequality in the developed economies of the 21st century. The book was both praised and criticised from many parts of the political and economic spectrum. Least controversial was his laying out of the evidence […]
What is it about ideological free marketeers and their shaky relationship with the facts? Everyone likes markets and free exchange is one of the best manifestations of human co-operation there is – so why tell lies about their limitations and the infrastructure required to make them work for our benefit? Sam Bowman of the Adam […]
For most of us, it’s a great boon to live in a world in which travel between even distant parts is relatively cheap and takes hours rather than days, weeks or months. We can visit, explore and learn about places and people we never could have done only 40 years ago. More than that, if […]
This is the first blog in a two-part series on ‘Bad Targets for Policy’. The second in the series will be on immigration. We’ve seen a lot of focus on the ‘costing’ of policies in the parties’ manifestos for the forthcoming UK election. But we must remember that money is only a means of keeping […]