Economy

On New Year’s Eve 2006-7, something unexpected happened.  For most of the previous two decades, most of the pubs where I live had operated a system where they gave tickets to regular drinkers in order to limit the number of people seeking entry.  This was a problem because one couldn’t …

The Indian government ruffled a few feathers at the COP this morning, by raising the thorny question of the £722bn they were supposed to receive to aid their transition away from fossil fuels.  Because, when all is said and done, the proposed transition is all about money.  Decommissioning the old …

Although introduced to the UK by a Labour government, the National Minimum Wage is closer to the Tory approach to economic policy.  This is because it passes the costs onto someone other than the state immediately.  In this case, Britain’s employers.  Labour governments, in contrast, have generally sought the politically …

A closer look at the supposed explosion in job vacancies provides a clue to the deeper features of a crisis which is only just beginning. The first thing to note is that vacancies are far from even across the economy.

According to Boris Johnson, the economic dislocation which appears to be gathering pace across the UK is merely “a period of adjustment after Brexit.” In Johnson’s formulation, those who would turn the clock back are tacitly in favour of the low-pay and poor working conditions which were encouraged when the …

Western capitalist economies don’t really do shortages.  There are a few stand alone exceptions such as a music festival or a sporting event, where demand so outstrips supply that queues form.  But for the most part – as we saw last week with the eye-watering rise in wholesale gas prices …

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – A well-meaning but not particularly bright left-leaning US politician – made a stir earlier this week by wearing a figure-hugging dress emblazoned with the slogan “Tax the Rich” to the prestigious 2021 Met Gala.  Since the slogan was clearly political, it wasn’t long before the various political …

Perhaps the most contentious – and least asked – question about industrial civilisation concerns its origins.  Why, of all the potential places in the world, should a small group of islands in the northeast Atlantic have emerged as the cradle of industrialisation?  Many possible reasons have been put forward, including: …

One of the consequences of the response to the pandemic and the disruption from Brexit is that labour shortages are appearing across the low-paid sectors of the economy.  So much so that even the metropolitan liberal Guardian has begun to wonder whether the benefits of higher wages for the low-paid …

Media has little in the way of memory and the rest of us struggle to remember much of what happened more than a week ago.  And so, the narratives we use in an attempt to make sense of the rapidly changing world we are living in, tend to revolve around …