Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2015

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