politics, economy and employment & labour
This might seem easy. The depreciation immediately after Brexit, plus subsequent declines in the number of Euros you can buy with a £, are pushing up import prices which feed into consumer prices (with a lag) which reduce real wages. But real wages depend on nominal wages as well as prices. So why are nominal […]
A constant refrain from politicians and others is that we have to leave the EU because we have to respect democracy, where by democracy they mean that 52% voted to do so. Arguments that the vote was based on lies by the Leave side are met with dismissive remarks like both sides were the same, […]
I often find that arguments for Lexit have many structural similarities to right wing arguments for Brexit. Take Larry Elliott’s latest piece for example. This includes: Sweeping exaggerations that seem designed to trigger nationalist sentiments. We are told that “under Tony Blair, the feeling was that globalisation had made the nation state redundant.” Confusing the […]
An interesting disagreement occurred this week between Martin Sandbu and the Economist, which prompted a subsequent letter from Philippe Legrain (see also Martin again here). The key issue is whether the German current account surplus, which has steadily risen from a small deficit in 2000 to a large surplus of over 8% of GDP, is […]
There have been many ideas put forward to explain the low growth in UK productivity, but among mainstream accounts the impact of austerity is not usually high up on the list of possibilities. I have talked before about what I call an ‘innovations gap’, and how the UK is currently suffering a particularly large innovations […]
A week or so ago, anticipating Macron’s victory and following defeats of the far right in Holland and Austria, I asked on Twitter why the US and UK seem to be more susceptible to right wing populism than elsewhere. It is a question that requires much more than a post to answer, but I thought […]
In a recent post I talked about the “neoliberal fantasists who voted Leave”. Here is Ryan Bourne from the influential Institute of Economic Affairs. He notes that “the mood music from the post-referendum Conservative party — with former Remain backers in No 10 and the Home Office overcompensating with a caricatured view of what voters want — is not […]
We have already begun to hear laments that Corbyn’s second victory means the end of Labour as a broad church. This is nonsense, unless that church is one where only people from the right and centre of the party are allowed to be its priests. Alison Charlton (@alicharlo) responded to my tweet to that effect […]
I think many people who argue against a second referendum have not taken on board the scale of the difference between the various Brexit options. We could retain access to the single market and free movement of labour (the Norway option). Or we could just cut a trade deal with the EU, do nothing on […]
If we cannot puncture some of the mythology around austerity … then we are doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes. Barack Obama, New York Times, April 2016 I have just completed a working paper based on my talk to the Royal Irish Academy at the end of last year. (Yes, I know, that was six months ago […]
John Quiggin starts a recent post on Crooked Timber (more below) with the warning ‘Amateur political analysis ahead’, and that applies even more to what follows. I start with the UK, but then broaden the discussion out. A recent piece by Steve Richards for The Independent has some similarities to a recent post of mine trying to explain the […]
Diane Coyle, in reviewing Rowan Moore’s book Slow Burn City: London in the 21st Century, focuses on the idea that forever rising house prices could gradually kill off what is now a vibrant city. As housing gets steadily more expensive, getting people to work there will get more and more difficult. In the meantime, young people who can afford […]
