Adam Lent
One day we might get a proper public debate about why the UK economy remains so anemic after six quarters of shrinkage. And, more worryingly, is now starting to lag badly behind some other equivalent economies. For me there were four big mistakes made which need close investigation and which we need to work out ways of avoiding in the future. We clearly also need to take further remedial action to address the damage done.
All this week, Community Links’ LinksUK blog team are debating the way in which poverty is portrayed in the media. Richard has a guest contribution up there today, about the general public’s unusually punitive attitudes to poverty in the UK. If we really want to end poverty in this country, we are also going to have to deal with the way ordinary voters think about people living in poverty.
Nicola Smith
Last week we highlighted that The Telegraph had included the earnings of employees in nationalised banks in its analysis of public sector pay. Although readers of the Guardian’s money pages may be a more sympathetic audience, it’s still unfortunate that the same mistake has been repeated. In his article on ‘public v private sector‘, David Brindle informs us that while private companies have cut jobs during the recession, the public sector has ‘added 290,000′.
Again, this is a result of the inclusion of the employees of nationalised banks in the public sector employment figures. Table 4(1), directly under the main public and private sector employment table in the ONS release, separates public sector employment by industry – and reveals that 196,000 of these ‘new’ jobs are in ‘financial corporations’.
Nicola Smith
I don’t know how you measure a social recession, but I thought that looking at trends like crime levels, homelessness, exclusions from school, life expectancy and suicide might help. Good news – things could be better but society’s definitely not shrinking.
Nigel Stanley
There is a very interesting piece in today’s FT about how labour markets have reacted to the recession. The neo-liberal orthodoxy of recent years has always been that easy hire and fire allows for the most efficient allocation of labour and therefore benefits the wider economy – a price worth paying for the insecurity suffered by individual employees. In a recession companies that found it easier to get rid of staff would survive and then prosper again as they could also easily take people on in the recovery phase knowing they could easily sack them again.
Some of us have never bought this idea, and it has not been the experience of this recession. As the FT says:
Adam Lent
Before the banks start trying to reassure their shareholders that they’ll find ways around Obama’s proposals, it was interesting to hear the Today programme’s interview with a City chap this morning. He admits that there is a sense that “there will be no place for the banks to hide at the end of all this” (quoted from memory). It was on at 8.40am and doesn’t seem to have been uploaded to the radio 4 site unfortunately. Maybe it will be later.
Adam Lent
The rather brilliant theorist of economic history, Carlota Perez, argues that after very large financial crashes, economies change their mode of operation. Systems that have been run by and in the interests of financial speculation become far more focused on the ‘real economy’. Profits and wealth are generated less by playing around with money and more by the search for productivity and innovation in other sectors.
Nigel Stanley
Regular readers will be following my occasional series looking at the differences between public and private sector pay, prompted by the regular attacks on the public sector by the small state right. Most of this has been a bit dull and geeky as I want to be more careful with the stats than our critics often are, though it has got quite lively. But what about gender?
