This week marks the end of this series of blogs. It has focused on economic analysis, on the growing social inequality since neo-liberalism came to dominate the political landscape after 1980, and on possible remedies for the problems. It is time now to consider the political implications. Continue reading
Do we support a free market?
The answer is clearly “maybe”.
We’ve nothing against the free market,
just as long as it doesn’t stay free.
That is from a poem I wrote in about 1990, satirising Labour Party policy. Neil Kinnock was trying to walk a precarious tightrope between traditional socialist policies and the new economic (and electoral) realities of the time. Now I look at the lines again, I am disconcerted to find that – far from satire – they come quite close to saying what I now believe. Continue reading
In the last blog, I summarised Thomas Piketty’s arguments in Capital in the 21st Century. Now I want to add another book into the mix – Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment by Aeron Davis. Continue reading
In last week’s blog, I summarised research published by Thomas Piketty that showed how economic growth was increasingly being diverted into the pockets of the very rich. The result is that inequalities in wealth are now at a level, throughout the Western world, approaching those obtaining at the start of the First World War. Piketty has shown how, even at an average rate of return on investment and with taxes paid, the growth in the wealth of the wealthy will, year by year, outstrip the growth in the wealth of everyone else. Continue reading
I will admit to having had two expectations when I opened Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The first was that the author was a left-wing economist, possibly a neo-Marxist, the darling of the European left, and someone with whom I was likely to disagree. The second was that I expected his book to be essentially polemical in style, long on diatribe and short on evidence. Continue reading
As previewed last week, this is the first in a series of blogs in which I will attempt to pull together various strands from my blogs of the past few years. Let me start by recapping where I had got to previously with thoughts on the economy, on politics and on the growing inequality of wealth. Continue reading
For the past few weeks, I have been conducting what writers call ‘background research’ and what other people call sitting in a deckchair reading a book. I am hoping, quite soon, to start work on a novel (or a series of novels) that will, to some extent, concern life and events in Britain in the past half-century. Continue reading
How much truth can we take? It depends on the individual. It depends on the circumstances. But probably none of us can take the pure, unvarnished truth (whatever that may be) on a permanent basis. And sometimes we can’t take very much of it at all. But we still need some explanation for our worst behaviour, and some means to sustain our futures. If the truthful explanation is too much to bear, we invent another one. The edifices of our personal lives, and the lives of our nations, rest upon such myths. Continue reading
I am reading Postwar, Tony Judt’s magnificent history of Europe since 1945. It is extremely long, and I am only up to the mid-’50s. The book will surely provide the material for future blogs, but here are some initial impressions on the immediate post-war years. Continue reading
I have spent the morning cataloguing all these blogs since I began writing them in February 2016. There have been 120 before this one, amounting to more than 100,000 words. The reason for the catalogue is that I have started to forget what I have already written and need to refresh my memory. Not that anyone else would notice, but I might. Continue reading
