A long time ago greed became a vogue word and then it wasn't and then it was and then it wasn't and for my whole adult life, greed is good.
As societies around the world we embrace each other just before we debase and in some cases destroy. There are countless genocides where people, races or religions are believed to be the issue. I've always thought it's just greed and control, with a smattering of testosterone thrown in. It's not just religions that do misogyny, but they do it well.
In the UK and Ireland we've had many different religions victimised on our shores from Catholics, Jews and Protestants through to the current victims who are more likely Muslims or as we roll the racist dice, anyone not considered white 'northern' European. The fact that everyone is mixed race and probably mixed religion in this country suggests we really are treading our way carelessly towards a proper backwater.
This is where Stiglitz comes in. He can see multi national power for what it is. Total and utter control, corruption and conformity helps. Conformity comes from an eager neo-liberal bunch who think deregulation of markets will lead to the fabled trickle down. What a load of shite. Most rich people don't give the shit off their shoes so trickle down my arse. Neo-liberal aka fascist fucks.
We are a very obedient lot in the main. South of the border we find culturally the English to be far more deferential than the Scots. There are huge swathes of people who don't believe in the monarchy or the Tory party ransacking their cities and towns with policies for greed, for the 1% but the groundswell for revolution is rare. Liverpool ditched the Sun newspaper after the tabloid trashed the reputation of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster. This was the greatest stand made by any city in England and it still stands today and I still cry real tears of pride in their strength. It stands alone in the last 40 years in my humble opinion. It is England's finest hour and always will be for me.
I'm Scottish, I live up the road and honestly, I'm with Stiglitz. We are culturally different from what is running us. I think other parts of England are the same. I worked for 3 years in Newcastle and happily supported England during a world cup. I'd worked in London 20 years earlier and happily supported Belgium and any other team playing England. Culturally I get the people I'm living and working with or I don't.
We believe in paying taxes to make a fairer society. I believe as a corporation my company should pay more. I believe at school we should be taught why taxes are valuable and not a disincentive to business.
I do however believe that our politicians really don't know why they are doing their jobs and that's a clear problem. Like any industry it has grown into a corner and we can't see where the thinkers bench is now. The political weeds have just grown over the top and it's why I believe strongly in revolution. I prefer it via the ballot box but revolution, please.
It's not 40+ years of wishing for a better government. It's 40+ years of realising they are getting worse. Not marginally but markedly worse. It's quite a feat for me to suggest Thatcher was better but at least she was honest about hating the socialism the Scots sought.
Nothing has really changed. There is still a significant amount of us in Scotland who would like everyone to have a house and if that be a council or a boat house, a house. Next up a joab. Next up a minimum wage of £25 an hour.
It is shameful that students carrying a golf bag can earn more in 4 @4 hour rounds than a care worker in a 40 hour week.
I digress as usual but I find that my nonsense from years gone by about why Thatcher's contraction of the UK economy via privatisation and pathological hatred has done little for our economy and even less for our economic health. Friedman weighed heavy at the time, a name rarely heard 40 years on.
What I feel I have always known, and a grocers daughter should've known is that it's the small money that keep spinning around the economy and the large money that disappears offshore.
I argued for a fiscal stimulus called increase the tax free allowance to £20,000. All the people who receive a £2000 bonus will spend it 10 times over.
Take it back off the people between £50-70,000, such that those at £70,000 are neutral.
This money will largely be spent in their local economy and we won't hear sob stories about local bakers, newsagents and the like closing down and being replaced by Estate agents and pawn shops. I feel like a broken record as it's been a deadbeat mantra so that's 40 years.
Stiglitz knows how bad inequality is for an economy and he's very forthright about it. He's also very simple on his views. He knows that what sorted the USA out wasn't so much Roosevelt and the mass programs but the armaments for WWII and the college education the people received thereafter.
The influx of brains included my Dad in 1962 in Michigan as well as his Glaswegian pal who stayed his whole life on campus, becoming a professor. This is almost doing what the Chinese government are now doing in placing their people in the UK, but of course we are one step ahead and deport everyone once they get a degree. I almost want to say that again. Once someone is of huge value to our economy we kick them out.
In the USA in 1962 it was the opposite. They might do it now, but back then they couldn't get enough of these brains from around the world. The more they learned, the greater their ambition to learn. I'd say this was the end of one part of a Kondratieff wave in some respect. I know that it coincides with the evolution of technology and the growing ambition to apply it across all fronts from putting people on the moon to washing clothes and keeping milk cool. Putting a TV in every home and latterly a PC and a phone.
We got a black n white TV in 1967 I think, and I got a half share in an amstrad for my 21st in 1983. Followers of Deadbeat will see the font change!
I got my first laptop about 1996 and a dongle so I could work from the pub by 1998.
The blackberry arrived and by 2007 it could never be left unattended.
It's all bite sized chunks but when I asked the question you have to leave one at home, cash or phone, only Jackie answered cash.
Yep, by 2023, the phone has displaced us. Whether recording our steps or our purchases it's now the must have chip. It isn't long until the tattoo is that chip. Surely we will just be using our wrist.
1999
I remember arguing unconvincingly that the levels of debt in 1999 were unsustainable for the USA never mind the UK and something had to give. I was a fan of the Prince song but it did rely on people having the money to party and only if they could keep borrowing it. Whilst the actual banking crisis in 2006, which finally manifest in 2008 was real, the seeds had been down long before with the vast majority of people wanting jam today, not tomorrow.
The rising household debt was real. It was spread right across the population and wasn't just the speculative punters towards the end who really just pushed the envelope. This steady demand curve fat outstripped supply and resulted in the full unemployment era of the Blair and baby Bush administrations. I would say all the other politicians too but their names escape me. Latterly called the P.I.G.S. there were a few who the bankers would lay the blame on whole clambering to offload their own septic tank of toxic debt instruments. I like to call it when Europe's penaions foolishly bailed out the USA.
There is no doubt however, this was the end of the demand led economy. From then on demand would be squashed by politicians posing as prudent. They can't be forgiven but pressure from the bankers to be bailed out and trusted for their itinerant incompetence is an odious if accurate excuse. In the UK people like Darling would be easily fooled into thinking it was the only way.
Earlier on this blog I wrote a note about student debt in England is now greater than the national debt of Ireland. When I was reading Stiglitz's great divide I noted in 2010 student debt in the USA had exceeded the $1tn credit card debt. One clearly going down while the other just grows and grows. His point is well made. You can only slide up the greasy pole if there is wealth to help you. If you can buy an internship, masters or move forward in the malaise of your youthful peers. It's quite simply disgusting, divisive and no way to grow your economy.
It's about here that I can see Stiglitz and I are not quite on the same page. He thinks politicians would want to improve the economy but I think power and short termism have never been closer. In the UK, that blink of an eye includes Liz Truss being able to say she was a prime minister, drawing the appropriate pension and pawkle a few pounds on the podium road show.
As I read Stiglitz I'm reminded of my Dad's time in Michigan in 1962. He genuinely wants to believe that people do want to get back to the beautiful American Dream of hard work paying off in the long run. This great myth got hijacked in my opinion by the marketing makeovers that see useless products and people perform like porpoise to capture the imagination, like a lorry salesman at the ingliston Sunday market in the 70's.
I remember coming home with a rotating cheese grater. I felt a wee bit conned. I had been. At 15, it was a good lesson, and for £2, a fairly cheap one. I was still using it 10 years later, so maybe I didn't quite learn the lesson.
No suprise really, I've always been very slow on the uptake, but like the elephant I am, once it's in there I do remember. I'll never know if Darling was complicit with the banks or just stupid. Either way I've always felt he lost any possible points and when he campaigned for better together I realised it was probably time to be apart. Like Brown they seemed to be stuck in an optics war and the sad part was they were convinced that Blair's bubble had come from that successful stance. My believe is Kinnock tripped over at the Sheffield conference and at the time the country had two almost reasonable options. Certainly better options than the USA has faced for a long time, with 2024 being no exception. A year in which the country has to find a way not to elect Trump. The smart money is certainly not on them succeeding.
Stiglitz takes us on a journey back to the 20's when agriculture production processes were evolving at a drastic rate leaving many farm workers out of a job, while food production increased. The general observation in a micro world sees me stop being a schoolboy in the post room and moving upstream into the settlements area. I was lucky in my work and kept evolving but I passed a lot of people who really just enjoyed being good at what they did and going home. I loved what I did and wanted to do it better. This often involved bypassing useless bosses and streamlining procedures that were pointless and replacing them with practical purposeful and valuable processes. Nothing cheersled my colleagues hearts more than another joke job I'd removed.
Traffic lights management was perhaps my favourite. When you ask people why they perform a task and they tell you it's for management I love to chuckle. If it's not for you to help you manage, it's not for management, I'd reply.
When you remove these jobs somebody always asks how you'll replace it. The answer I'd use was we have a tractor now. We have a combine harvester. Trust me, the guys sitting ticking off every item on the bank statement against every item on our records don't need to as the computer has been born.
Structural changes are at the heart of Kondratieff's thinking and technology is clearly one, both on the agricultural sector of the USA in the 20's and nowadays. You might not need traffic lights but you still need a driver.
I think Stiglitz with his pal Bruce Greeneald nail it. This great depression was a long time in the making in the USA. It's no surprise it arrived, more a suprise it took so long. The collapse on demand is everything and that's where I absolutely adore the hypothesis.
In my time at university I sat and explained that Thatcher had a strategy to confront the unions and it was called high unemployment. It was ironic that she won a landslide election on a slogan that labour wasn't working as the dole queue hit 1 million. When employees in manufacturing fell by another couple of million the queue had reached 3m. People were being bought out of their jobs with generous redundancy terms or unscrupulous laws enabling closures. Unions would see themselves destroyed in a few fitful years. Unable to respond together they found themselves on the back door and their memberships plummet.
The country was told we had to move to a service based economy. In short servitude would've been a better description. Big redundancy payments allowed some to buy a pub, a taxi or even a guest house. This move to the service based economy worked for a few. The vast majority were offered little training because the new jobs didn't exist and retraining for a job that would disappear another few years down the road suggested folly. In the 1980's pop music split down party lines with many Scottish and northern bands holding government to account while London and the south preferred to celebrate with big hair extensions, fake tan and tinsel teeth. The makeover was complete. London would soon be back on charge and the unions despatched like a heffer with a bolt.
The seismic waves through those communities will always be talked about but economic recovery for them became a cause celebre, as getting on one's bike became the prescribed medication.
I often wonder if we had staged a bike protest and had 3 million people cycle to London would they have been as successful as the matches from history. It's a lovely image but one I might ask to draw.
All of which leads us beautifully back to the USA, Stiglitz and the great depression. Farm workers with no money won't be able to support the towns bakery, pub or even a coffee shop. Yep, town closes. We watched mining towns close in the 80's and in the mid west we saw what happened, throw in a few dust bowls too.
