Jon Chadwick No. “Productivity isn’t everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.” Paul Krugman This is why I think that Paul Krugman is wrong, despite his Nobel prize. People value human contact … Read more
Bloody immigrants eh? Coming over here, driving down wages, destroying terms and conditions of employment. Over the last few days British politicians have debated Brexit in the House of Commons, while their parties respective spin Doctors have filled the airwaves and provided content to partisan websites with endless drivel. The arguments about Brexit are tangled … Read more
I hope that people aren’t getting too bored with discussions of inequality, because this is another blog which touches on 2 familiar themes; how income is distributed; and how governments produce the statistics that we use to inform political and economic debates. There is a common assumption that over last few decades the economic performance … Read more
I have written previously about why the current system for measuring unemployment might not giving us an accurate picture: Unemployments rising in the Chigley End of Town People will have read in the media that UK unemployment is at it’s lowest since the 1970s. This from the BBC is typical: I thought that … Read more
Another micro-blog, this time on PFI, and a not very hot take on Carillion and Capita. I was going to avoid talking about the collapse of Carillion. I get a bit frustrated talking about PFI because lots of people strongly dislike it without knowing much about it, which makes for a less than fun debate. … Read more
I was a Miner, I was a Banker/I was a Quantitative Analyst/Between the Wars/I played at Glastonbury/In time of austerity A bit of a follow up from last weeks look at the ways property wealth, property tax and pension wealth interact and how monetary policy can change how wealth is re-distributed. While I was writing … Read more
Last month I wrote about attitudes to inequality specifically why I think that recent headlines about Rampant Inequality are way off the mark. The belief that we live in an era of great inequality is so prevalent that a lot of people reacted with disbelief when I wrote that wealth inequality in the UK was … Read more
The two headlines above, one from the Washington Post, and one from the Guardian are typical of recent press stories about the rise in inequality . Inequality is apparently the defining characteristic of our current age. The Guardian has an excellent series of articles chronicling how inequality shapes the modern world, while Oxfam have published … Read more
I write my blog in WordPress, and I can check out how many reads I get for every blog. Sometimes you get surprising insights – there is someone in Canada who binge reads my blog every few months for eample. Breezy businessy blogs written from a vaguely leftish perspective are popular, some subjects less … Read more