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Britain has been hit harder than you think
The Financial Times 05/02/10
Any British citizen who bases his or her vote in the forthcoming general election on the "flash" official national income figures showing that output rose by 0.1 per cent in the final quarter of 2009 ought to be disenfranchised. These initial estimates are not exact enough even to say where in a range of plus or minus 1 per cent the change occurred. Later revisions - which go on for years after the period in question - could be in either direction. Our hypothetical citizen ought to be doubly disenfranchised if the intended vote is changed by similar decimal percentage point movement in the estimate for the first quarter of 2010 due a few weeks before the most likely date of the general election, May 6...more |
Keynes, the universe and everything
UCL speech 02/02/10
The true and boring title of this talk would be "A Macroeconomic Perspective" This would have guaranteed an empty hall. I shall try and make it more interesting by looking at it partly through the eyes of John Maynard Keynes who has become fashionable again for obvious reasons. But I must warn you that I am not an expert on "what Keynes really meant", still less on what he would be saying if he were alive today. I am taking the controversial course of assuming that he meant what he said when he said it. I am not by nature an idolater; but the advantage of following a few of Keynes's ideas was his extreme responsiveness to the world around him and his ability to absorb and rationalise its changing moods...more |
The many faces of liberalism
The Financial Times 23/01/10
Reviews of The Neo-liberal State, British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour and The Science of Liberty
The word "neoliberalism" came into widespread circulation two or three decades ago, in particular in French political circles, as a term of abuse to denote the Anglo-American espousals of free markets, especially under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It is still used in this way today: three new books attempt to analyse the basic issues surrounding the term. Raymond Plant tackles the concept directly in The Neo-liberal State. In British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour, a collection of essays, it crops up not by name but as something from which both New Labour and the Cameron Conservatives have been trying to get away. In The Science of Liberty, on the other hand, Timothy Ferris vigorously defends the European notion of liberalism, not shirking the pro-capitalist implications but dispensing with "neo"...more |
 Against The Flow: Samuel Brittan's book
Atlantic Books - Now in paperback
"Samuel Brittan has been one of the Financial Times' leading columnists for nearly thirty years. He has also advised numerous Chancellors of the Exchequer on economic policy. Against the Flow collects the most important of his writings from the last three decades. Taken together the pieces in Against the Flow amount to a robust defence of classic liberalism"...more |
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