I’m afraid this title will make some switch off or ignore, and some bristle with hostility – and that is exactly the problem. I suggest we have to face up to what Eugenics is and what it is not. It is certainly not for example, as is often suggested, Naziism, where officially proscribed life was… Read more
Category:
Economics
Economics Theory
What is this government’s purpose?
An interesting ‘Observer’ editorial laments the decline of Keynes’ post-war ‘consensus’ for the future of civilised society as it seemed to be at the time. Conservatives mobilised an argument that generous welfare spending did not just undermine capitalism, but had inflationary, destabilising consequences and hence was a threat to democratic governance. Our government is similarly… Read more
Message for Lisa
“The lesson from the last election… is that people are smarter than we think.” according to Lisa Nandy. I cannot unfortunately embed the actual snippet from the Newsnight programme – but Lisa Nandy says that Labour made promises in their latest manifesto, that they simply couldn’t keep – which is, I’m afraid.. completely untrue… Still,… Read more
Authoritarian Capitalism
CoronaVirus could possibly, spell the end for some Eurozone banks as by pushing the Eurozone ito recession it could make their lives very difficult. It is certainly true that the German economy particularly, export orientated as it is, has suffered since the Chinese downturn and CoronaVirus cannot be helpful. I would not be surprised if… Read more
Liberty, Equality and Accountability
No, Fraternity, isn’t part of this…. Nonetheless, I suggest this is a very powerful conclusion by Billy Bragg in an interesting podcast with the lawyer Adam Wagner, in which they talk about ‘agency’. I thought it very incisive as they, quite correctly in my view, suggest that neoliberalism gives ‘agency’ to both businessmen and ‘markets’… Read more
HS2 wail – back to the future
Johnson will probably have a problem with the HS2 review. He wants to be popular, thinks he has been ‘lent’ votes in the north, but lots of his Tory MPs think that HS2’s increasing costs are prohibitive, it cuts through their blissful Tory shires – or perhaps it is just a gravy train. I confess… Read more
Average length of time to hold a share on London Stock Exchange?
EIGHT SECONDS (the source is Radio Four’s today programme this morning). This exposes as a lie the idea that the Stock Exchange is a source of capital and long term finance for what used to be called the Joint Stock Company. The London Stock Exchange is a casino – pure and simple. This is yet… Read more
Drugs ‘R’ Us
This was a retweet from a Lincolnshire Police Chief Inspector which I encountered and which I feel is well worth drawing attention to. It is a quite devastating commentary by (I understand) the former Chief Constable of Durham : The end result is a fully self-defeating drugs policy. And not just for drugs, but also… Read more
Why don’t UK citizens retire as early as the French?
There seems to be no UK publicity about the general dissatisfaction with the suggestion of Macron’s retirement age increases in France. The video below is only the half of it… But although this is, in many ways, a welcome protest it is not a call for solidarity, but for self interest. Thus the train drivers… Read more
Wealth always trickles up – it’s all in the maths
I bumped into a very interesting article in the ‘Scientific American’ – which I confess is not my usual bed-time reading and whose maths I find sometimes fairly challenging…. But nonetheless, by using ‘agent-based models’ (indeed they could even be called free agents) a team were able to replicate equal exchanges within an economy and… Read more