Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2015

HOW GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS CAN REINVIGORATE THE LEFT IN EUROPE

I could not have been more wrong in my assessment , prior to the conclusion of the marathon negotiations that averted, for the time being, at least, Greece's departure from the Euro, that her prime minister Mr Tsipras would not sign up to a deal that would heap further damage on his country's economy. Like other observers , I had over-estimated the contingency planning of Greece's left-wing Syriza government, which turned out not to have a plan B - not one, at least, that it was willing to execute . It was obliged, therefore, to fall in with whatever accommodation the other Eurozone members were prepared to extend to them. In thus finally succumbing to the ineluctable pressure of his Eurozone colleagues, Mr Tsipras tacitly acknowledged on behalf of his party the overwhelming power of money to frame political decision-making. The Eurozone is structured to prevent governments from unnerving the markets by borrowing more than they can easily afford. Since attracti

JUST BECAUSE MOST CARING WORK IS UNPAID, IT DOESN'T MEAN THAT IT'S NOT VALUABLE

Need people be lonely in the sunset of their lives? Britain's Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has called upon people to take more responsibility for their own health. He has also called for a new approach to the way that elderly people are cared for. The economic arguments are persuasive. Hunt states that smoking-related illnesses costs the NHS an estimated £2.7 billion a year. Type 2 diabetes - closely associated with being overweight - affects one in 16 of the adult population and costs the NHS £8 billion a year. Meanwhile, one in five children are leaving primary school clinically obese. In the case of the elderly, Hunt rightly notes that the task of caring is not getting any smaller. “By the end of this parliament,” he says, “we will have a million more over 70s, one third of them living alone.” He points to the “heroic army” of family carers and volunteers, before observing that caring for elderly family members will have to become as central to people's lives as

GREEK CRISIS: TIME TO INVERT THE HIERARCHY OF WEALTH IN EUROPE

Alternative hierarchies of wealth-creation What does it mean when the economy of a country shrinks, as Greece's has done, by a quarter? It means that the money flowing through the economy is reduced in quantity, that the total of people's money incomes (both earned and unearned) is reduced and that the total money value of what they buy is reduced accordingly. This also means that the country is less productive in money terms. That use of the word “money” as a qualifier in each phrase of the previous sentence is significant. “Money incomes”, “money value” and “money terms” are not the only ways of quantifying wealth, and the fact that assets or goods become more expensive does not make them inherently more worth having. Cheap money flooded into Greece in the decade before the crash, funding investments based on rising asset values. The size of the money economy, measured as GDP, soared as a consequence. But much of that wealth was not real. The crash, when it came

BEYOND GDP - HOW MEASURING REAL WEALTH CAN PAVE THE WAY FOR THE BASIC INCOME

The idea of a basic income - a fixed cash payment to all individuals, in lieu of state benefits and tax allowances, but sufficient to cater for their basic needs - is increasingly emerging from the shadowy world of obscure think tanks and idealists into the starker light of mainstream politics. This light is much more exposing, as the UK Green Party discovered to i t s cost in the run up to the general election earlier this year. Although a citizens' income has been part of their policy platform for some time, it was set at such a low level that many current recipients of state benefits would have been worse off under their proposals. The basic income model is only viable if the sum allocated is large enough for people to live on. "Large enough" is a relative concept, so the level of the basic income needs to be relative, too. One way to achieve that is to make it a fixed percentage of per capita national wealth. This means that the market can do its damnedest

ANGER IN EUROLAND, WHERE “GOOD NEWS” IS JUST FOR THE MARKETS

European finance ministers reacted angrily, it was reported , to what they perceived to be Greek intransigence during their meeting in the Latvian capital of Riga last week. They don't like the refusal of the anti-austerity Greek government to play their game, and they have yet to work out what to do about it. The Greeks know that they can't repay their debts, and that some sort of debt-forgiveness within the Euro framework is a better outcome for all concerned that forcing Greece to abandon the Euro altogether. In the latter case the credibility of the single currency is undermined, default is certain and the lenders will have to sing for their money. In the former, order is maintained and only a proportion of debt is written off. Logic, therefore, is on the side of the Greeks, which makes anger a natural response from their interlocutors, who have boxed themselves into a corner from which they can only lose. Their frustration is palpable: the big boys always set the rul

ED MILIBAND IS RIGHT ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY. HE JUST DOESN’T KNOW IT

<a title="By The CBI on Flickr (CBI climate change summit 2008 on Flickr) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AEd_Miliband_at_the_CBI_Climate_Change_Summit_2008_3.jpg"><img width="512" alt="Ed Miliband at the CBI Climate Change Summit 2008 3" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Ed_Miliband_at_the_CBI_Climate_Change_Summit_2008_3.jpg/512px-Ed_Miliband_at_the_CBI_Climate_Change_Summit_2008_3.jpg"/></a>One third of probation officers employed by privatised service provider Sodexo could face redundancy in the next 12 months, The Guardian reported last week . They are to be replaced – in part, at least – by electronic kiosks that allow offenders to “report in” electronically. Ed Miliband must have been delighted. The news came on the day that the Labour leader launched his party's manifesto for busines

NEVER MIND PUTIN - FRACKING AND TTIP WILL MAKE IDIOTS OF US ALL

Officials both in Europe and America, The Guardian reports , are convinced “that the Russians have infiltrated, or are helping to fund, NGOs campaigning in Europe against fracking and the proposed free trade agreement between the EU and the US”. The talk, apparently, among policymakers is of “Putin’s useful idiots” inadvertently giving succour to “slick Kremlin operations aimed at dividing and enfeebling Europe”. As somebody who has written, both here and elsewhere, about TTIP , I am left wondering how idiotic I have been. I am opposed to the general thrust of the Transatlantic trade agreement because its benefits appear far fewer than the harms it may cause. I am also opposed to fracking, and for a similar reason: the benefits of extracting fuel from the ground are clearly offset by some serious drawbacks. In taking both these positions I am on the side of people everywhere, both those who want to make an honest living from their work and those wishing to avoid the worst effects of

WHOSE SIDE IS THE EUROPEAN UNION ON?

Whose side is the E.U. on? It is a question that would have arisen even without Syriza's election triumph in Greece , since the E.U. has become a divisive issue in the national politics of many member states. Attacks come from across the spectrum: both viscerally anti-E.U. nationalist parties such as UKIP and France's Front National , and radical movements such as Syriza and Spain's Podemos that are not anti-E.U. as such, but strongly oppose the economic policies that are embedded in its institutional structure. The question may be out there, but Eurocrats would prefer not to think in those terms. The E.U. is supposed to be quite the opposite of political: an institutional counterweight to politicisation, seeking out consensus that is good for everybody. The word “harmonisation” is prominent in its vocabulary, reflecting the aspiration of its founding fathers to efface the historical rivalries that have subjected the continent to centuries of conflict. To take sides, get