This article traces the history of ‘crowding out’, and its use as a justification for austerity and state deflation from its origins in the 1920s to its latest post-2010 incarnation. It examines why governments have kept turning to austerity and continue to justify it on the grounds that public sector activity crowds out more productive private activity, despite the accumulated evidence that this traditional pro-market formulation has failed to deliver its stated goals. It examines three other embedded forms of crowding out that have been highly damaging—leading to weakened social resilience and more fragile economies—but which have been ignored by both governments and mainstream political economists.

THE IDEA OF ‘crowding out’ has long been one of the central canons of pro-market economic theory. The concept was first promoted at an international conference of officials in Brussels in 1920 to discuss ‘sound economic policy’ in the postwar years. Given limited capital, asked the British delegation, will ‘Governments or private industry’ use it more productively? ‘The answer is … private industry’.¹ This argument was then placed at the heart of a strategy of state-imposed austerity through cuts in public spending and wages applied in Britain and other nations in the early 1920s.

Following the short-lived boom at the end of the 1914–18 war, Britain, along with much of Europe, faced growing economic turbulence and surging dole queues, along with high levels of public debt from funding the war. With heightened public expectations of social reform, the coalition government Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, initially promised social reconstruction through higher state spending, especially on homes and schooling. Simultaneously, the Prime Minister faced demands from the owners of capital for a return to the pre-war status quo.

During the war, large chunks of the economy had been taken under state control, with the subordination of private profit to steer resources to the war effort. While the public was calling for a better society in return for the sacrifices of war, business leaders were demanding the dismantling of the heightened state intervention of the war years, lower rather than higher public spending, and the reversal of the strengthened bargaining power labour had enjoyed during the war years. Political and industrial clashes were the inevitable outcome.

Deepening recession and the fear of mounting unrest, fuelled by the shadow of Bolshevism, induced panic among the ruling political and corporate classes. In response, the government dropped its commitment to social renewal in favour of a programme of austerity, or state induced deflation. This involved severe cuts in public spending, including reductions in pay for police, teachers and other public servants—cuts dubbed the ‘Geddes axe’ on the advice of a committee chaired by Sir Eric Geddes, the Minister of Transport.

Economic revival, it was argued, depended on lower spending by the state, lower wages and a return to a balanced budget, with state spending matched by tax revenue. If the state had borrowed more to meet its high-profile postwar pledges on housing and education, it was argued, more efficient and more pro-value private activity would have been ‘crowded out’. The measures, based on the idea of an automatic trade-off between state and private activity, were, it was asserted, simply sound economics based on fundamental laws—and not to be tinkered with—of how the economy worked. These ‘laws’ drew on the doctrines of the early classical economists that free markets and minimal state intervention would bring equilibrium, stability, and optimal growth.

Austerity Britain

Since the 1920s, governments have repeated this strategy of austerity—based on the doctrine of crowding out—on several occasions. These include the early 1930s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the post-2010 decade. Despite the time gaps, these episodes have been marked by almost identical justifications and remarkably similar impacts.

One of the constant themes has been a replay of the balanced budget theory of the 1920s and 1930s. Another has been that public spending cuts and lower wages would release scarce resources for the private sector. In 1975, two Oxford economists, Roger Bacon and Walter Eltis, argued in Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers that Britain’s economic plight stemmed from too many social workers, teachers and civil servants and not enough workers in industry and commerce. Buying into this argument, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, told the House of Commons in 1979, ‘[we need to] roll back the boundaries of the public sector’ in order ‘to leave room for commerce and industry to prosper’.2 In June 2010, launching another rolling programme of spending cuts in his first budget, the Chancellor, George Osborne, repeated this claim that public spending ‘crowds out’ private endeavour.

Again, the presumption was that a more robust economy requires more private and less state activity, along with the counter-intuitive idea that austerity was the route to growth and enterprise. The somewhat crude ‘private sector good, public sector bad’ mantra was widely echoed. ‘The next government is going to have many challenges’, wrote the Times in 2010, ‘but tackling a public sector that has become obese … is going to have to be a priority’.³ Channel 4 went a step further with a programme describing state spending as a ‘Trillion pound horror story’, while The Spectator magazine called it ‘the most important programme to appear on British television this year’.⁴

So, does the austerity/crowding out theory stand up? And if not, why has it been so widely applied? The accumulated evidence shows that it is at best a significant oversimplification of the way economies work. Crowding out of private by too much public sector activity might apply when an economy is operating at full capacity and employment, but the doctrine has only been applied in situations of economic crisis, high unemployment and inadequate demand. Even at full capacity, there is still a choice to be made about the appropriate balance between public and private activity.

Heterodox economists, such as John Hobson in the early twentieth century, had offered an alternative route to growth and out of crisis. His work, which had an important influence on J. M. Keynes, showed that recessions were the product of a shortfall of demand stemming from ‘under-consumption’ and ‘over-production’ triggered in large part by a lack of purchasing power among low- and middle-income households arising from extreme levels of wealth and income inequality.⁵

In the 1920s and early 1930s, slamming on the public spending brakes proved counter-productive. It cut demand and slowed recovery, with private as well as public activity ‘crowded out’. The strategy had minimal effect on improving the state of the public finances, but led to a retreat on social programmes, while unemployment never fell below one million in the inter-war years.

A hundred years on, the Osborne cuts have had a very similar, and predictable impact. They also came with a new label: ‘expansionary austerity’, but an identical message—that a smaller state would generate greater stability via lower interest rates, greater confidence and faster growth. In the event, the strategy turned out to be an additional assault on an already weakened economy, with the cuts in public spending having little or no impact on expanding private activity, while damaging the quality of Britain’s social infrastructure and weakening its system of social support.⁶ One critic, David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, concluded that, by destroying productive capacity and making households worse off, the austerity programme simply ‘crushed the fragile recovery’.⁷ In one estimate, rolling cuts in public spending were said to have shrunk the economy by £100 billion by the end of the decade.⁸ Another study showed that if real-terms growth in public spending at the 3 per cent level inherited in 2010 from the previous Labour government had been maintained and paid for by matching tax rises, Britain’s government debt burden would still have been lowered by 2019.⁹

None of this means that crowding out never occurs. It just takes very different forms from the process advanced in neoliberal thinking. There are three alternative and distinct types of crowding out at work that have consistently had a malign effect on both the economy and wider society, yet have not been systematically addressed in the mainstream economic literature or by relevant government departments.¹⁰ First, the idea that markets know best in nearly all circumstances has shifted the balance between private and public activity too far in favour of the former, thus crowding out the latter. Second, an increasing share of private activity has been geared less to its primary function—to building economic strength and creating new wealth—than to boosting personal corporate rewards in a way which fuels inequality, weakens economies and crowds out economic and social progress. Third, there is the way the return of the ‘luxury capitalism’ of the nineteenth century (triggered by the application of pro-inequality neoliberal policies) has come at the expense of the meeting of essential material and social needs.

The balance between private and public activity

The simple notion—private good, public bad—has long been overplayed by neoliberal theorists. Both have a role to play and the real issue is getting the right balance between the two. State spending plays a crucial role not just in meeting wider social goals, but in supporting economic dynamism and stability. Private corporations do not operate in a vacuum. The profits they make, the dividends they pay and the rewards received by executives stem from a too-often unacknowledged interdependence with wider society, including the state. Business provides jobs and livelihoods, while responding to consumer demand. Society provides the workforce, education, transport, multiple forms of inherited infrastructure and often substantial state subsidies.

History shows that while bad decisions are too common, carefully constructed and evidence-based state intervention can have a highly positive impact. Government responsibility lies in helping to shape markets, prevent market abuse, support innovation, share the burden of risk-taking in the development of new technologies, promote public and private wealth creation and protect citizens. It is now time to ask if these functions—from market regulation to citizen protection—have been underplayed.

Britain is a heavily privatised and weakly regulated economy. Among affluent nations, it has a comparatively low level of public spending, including social spending and public investment in infrastructure, relative to the size of the economy.¹¹ A relatively low portion of the economy is publicly owned.¹² With the cut-price sell-off of state assets, from land to state-owned enterprises, the share of the national wealth pool held in common has fallen sharply from a third in the 1970s to less than a tenth today. This ongoing privatisation process has also greatly weakened the public finances. Britain is one of only a handful of rich nations with a deficit on their public finance balance sheet, with net public wealth—public assets minus debt—now at minus 20 per cent of the economy. The balance stood at plus 40 per cent in 1970. This shift has greatly weakened the state’s capacity to handle issues like inequality, social reconstruction and the climate crisis.¹³

The emphasis on private capital as the primary engine of the economy has failed to deliver the gains promised by its advocates. Since the counter-revolution against postwar social democracy from the early 1980s, and especially since 2010, levels of private investment, research and development, and productivity—key determinants of economic strength—have been low both historically and compared with other rich countries. Several factors account for Britain’s relative private ‘investment deficit’. They include Britain’s low wage history, with abundant cheap labour dulling the incentive to invest, and the perverse system of financial incentives that makes it more attractive for executives to line their pockets than build for the future. There is also the preference given to capital owners—an increasingly narrow group—in the distribution of the gains from corporate activity. In the four years from 2014, FTSE 100 companies generated net profits of £551 billion and returned £442 billion of this to shareholders in share buy-backs and dividends, leaving only a small portion of these gains to be used for private investment and improved wages that support economic strength.¹⁴ With UK corporations increasingly owned by overseas institutional investors, such as US asset management firms, little of this profit flow has ended up in UK pension and insurance funds and back into the domestic economy.

Some forms of financial and business activity have played a destructive role. In a remarkable parallel with the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, the 2008 financial crash and the financial crisis that followed were classic examples of the impact of uncontrolled market failure. They were the product of tepid regulation of the financial system that turned a blind eye to a lethal cocktail of excessive profiteering and reckless gambling by global finance. It was only public intervention on a mass scale to bail out the banks—and many of the architects of the crash—that prevented an even greater crisis.

Claims about the overriding benefits of the outsourcing of public services to private companies have been exposed by a succession of scandals involving large British companies like G4S and Serco and by damning reports of the consequences of outsourcing in the NHS, the probation service and army recruitment.¹⁵ Such claims were also undermined by the collapse of two giant multi-billion-pound behemoths—the UK construction company Carillion and the public service supplier Interserve (which employed 45,000 people in areas from hospital cleaning to school meals). In the ten years to 2016, Carillion, sunk by self-serving executive behaviour and mismanagement, liked to boast about another malign form of crowding out—of how it raised dividend payments to shareholders every year, with such payments absorbing most of the annual cash generation, rather than building resilience.

Extraction

A second form of crowding out stems from the return of a range of extractive business mechanisms aimed at capturing a disproportionate share of the gains from economic activity. While some of today’s towering personal fortunes are a reward for value-creating activity that brings wider benefits for society as a whole, many are the product of a carefully manipulated, and largely covert, transfer of existing (and some new) wealth upwards. Early economists, such as the influential Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, warned—in 1896—of the distinction between ‘the production or transformation of economic goods’ and ‘the appropriation of goods produced by others.’¹⁶ Such ‘appropriation’ or ‘extraction’ benefits capital owners and managers—those who ‘have’ rather than ‘do’—and crowds out activity that could yield more productive and social value. It delivers excessive rewards to owners and executives at the expense of others, from ordinary workers and local communities to small businesses and taxpayers.¹⁷

Extraction has been a key driver of Britain’s low wage, low productivity and growth sapping economy. Many large companies have been turned into cash cows for executives and shareholders. A key source of this process has been the return of anti-competitive devices described as ‘market sabotage’ by the American heterodox economist Thorstein Veblen over a century ago’.¹⁸ In contrast to the claims of pro-market thinkers, corporate attempts to undermine competitive forces have been an enduring feature in capitalism’s history, contributing to erratic business performance and economic turbulence.

Far from the competitive market models of economic textbooks, the British—and global—economy is dominated by giant, supranational companies. Key markets—from supermarkets, energy supply and housebuilding, to banking, accountancy and pharmaceuticals—are controlled by a handful of ‘too big to fail’ firms. The oligopolistic economies created in recent decades are, despite the claims of neoliberal theorists, a certain route, as predicted by many distinguished economists, from the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, to the Cambridge theorist, Joan Robinson, to weakened competition, extraction and abnormally high profit. This new monopoly power, according to one study of the US economy, has been a key determinant of ‘the declining labor share; rising profit share; rising income and wealth inequalities; and rising household sector leverage, and associated financial instability.’¹⁹

Although they helped pioneer popular and important innovations, the founders of today’s monolithic technology companies have turned themselves from original ‘makers’ into ‘takers’ and ‘predators’. Companies like Google and Amazon have entrenched their market power by destroying rivals and hoovering up smaller competitors, a form of private-on-private crowding out of small by more powerful firms. Multi-billionaires in large part because of immense global monopoly power, the Google, Amazon and Facebook founders can be seen as the modern day equivalents of the American monopolies created by the ‘robber barons’ such as J. D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould through the crushing of competitors at the end of the nineteenth century.

The House of Have and the House of Want

The third type of crowding out follows from the way the growth of extreme opulence for the few has too often been bought, in effect, at the expense of wider wellbeing and access to basic essentials for the many. Today’s tearaway fortunes are less the product of an historic leap in entrepreneurialism and new wealth creation than of the accretion of economic power and elite control over scarce resources. It is a paradox of contemporary capitalism that as societies get more prosperous, many fail to ensure the most basic of needs are fully met.

In Britain, elements of the social progress of the past are, for a growing proportion of society, being reversed. Compared with the 1970s, a decade when inequality and poverty levels were at an historic low, poverty rates have more or less doubled, while both income and wealth have become increasingly concentrated at the top. Housing opportunities for many have shrunk and life expectancy rates have been falling for those in the most deprived areas. Mass, but hit and miss, charitable help has stepped in to help fill a small part of the growing gaps in the state’s social responsibilities. While Britain’s poorest families have faced static or sinking living standards, the limits to the lifestyle choices of the rich are constantly being raised. The private jet, the luxury yacht, the staff, even the private island, are today the norm for the modern tycoon.

In heavily marketised economies with high levels of income and wealth concentration, the demands of the wealthy will outbid the needs of those on lower incomes. More than one hundred years ago, the Italian-born radical journalist and future British MP, Leo Chiozza Money, had warned, in his influential book, Riches and Poverty, that ‘ill-distribution’ encourages ‘non-productive occupations and trades of luxury, with a marked effect upon national productive powers.’²⁰ The ‘great widening’ of the last four decades has, as in the nineteenth century, turned Britain (and other high inequality nations such as the US) into a nation of ‘luxury capitalism’. The pattern of economic activity has been skewed by a super-rich class with resources deflected to meeting their heightened demands.

While Britain’s poorest families lack the income necessary to pay for the most basic of living standards, demand for superyachts continues to rise. The UK is one of the highest users of private jets, contributing a fifth of related emissions across Europe. The French luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH—Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy—is the first European mega-company to be worth more than $500 billion. Resources are also increasingly directed into often highly lucrative economic activity that protects and secures the assets of the mega-rich. Examples include the hiring of ‘reputation professionals’ paid to protect the errant rich and famous, the use of over-restrictive copyright laws, new ways of overseeing and micromanaging workers, as well as a massive corporate lobbying machine.

The distributional consequences of an over-emphasis on market transactions is starkly illustrated in the case of the market for housing. Here, a toxic mix of extreme wealth and an overwhelmingly private market has brought outsized profits for developers and housebuilders at the cost of a decline in the level of home ownership, a lack of social housing and unaffordable private rents. The pattern of housebuilding is now determined by the power of the industry and the preferences of the most affluent and rich. Following the steady withdrawal of state intervention in housing from the 1980s—with local councils instructed by ministers to stop building homes—housebuilders and developers have sat on landbanks and consistently failed to meet the social housing targets laid down in planning permission. Instead of boosting the supply of affordable social housing, scarce land and building resources have been steered to multi-million-pound super-luxury flats, town houses and mansions. In London, Manchester and Birmingham, giant cranes deliver top end sky-high residential blocks, mostly bought by speculative overseas buyers and left empty. The richest crowd out the poorest, or as Leonard Cohen put it, ‘The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes, everybody knows.’

There has been no lack of warnings of the negative economic and social impact of economies heavily geared to luxury consumption, most of them ignored. Examples include the risk of the coexistence of stark poverty and extreme wealth: of what the radical Liberal MP, Charles Masterman, called, in 1913 ‘public penury and private ostentation’, and what the American radical political economist Henry George had earlier called ‘The House of Have and the House of Want’.²¹ Then there was the influential 1950s’ warning from the American economist, J. K. Galbraith, of ‘private affluence and public squalor’.²² ‘So long as material privation is widespread’, wrote the economist, Fred Hirsch, in the 1970s, ‘the conquest of material scarcity is the dominant concern.’²³

For much of the last century, policy makers have seen wealth and poverty as separate, independent conditions. But that view has always been a convenient political mistruth. If poverty has nothing to do with what is happening at the top, the issue of inequality can be quietly ignored. Yet, the scale of the social divide and the life chances of large sections of society are ultimately the outcome of the conflict over the spoils of economic activity and of the interplay between governments, societal pressure and how rich elites—from land, property and private equity tycoons to city financiers, oil barons and monopolists—exercise their power. In recent decades, the outcome of these forces has favoured the already wealthy, with the shrinking of the economic pie secured by the poorest. As the eminent historian and Christian Socialist, R. H. Tawney, declared in 1913, ‘What thoughtful people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice, a problem of riches.²⁴

Conclusion

These three alternative forms of crowding out have imposed sustained harm on social and economic resilience. Despite this, governments have continued to apply a long-discredited austerity-based theory of crowding out, while ignoring other, arguably more damaging forms of the phenomena. The latest application of the original theory since 2010 has inflicted ‘vast damage on public services and the public sector workforce’, without delivering the declared goal of ‘crowding in’ through faster recovery and growth, or improved public finances.²⁵

Britain is currently being subjected to yet another wave of austerity, with the 2022 Autumn Statement announcing a new package of projected public spending plans, higher taxes and lower public sector real wages, again in the name of fixing the public finances and boosting growth.²⁶ It’s the same short-term, narrowly focussed strategy that, by digging the economy into a deeper hole and cutting public investment, has failed time and again over the last 100 years.

Meanwhile, other damaging forms of the crowding out of key public services, value-adding economic activity and the meeting of vital needs, driven by over-reliance on markets, excess inequality and dubious private-on-private activity, are simply ignored or dismissed.

Notes

¹ C. E. Mattei, The Capital Order, Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 2022, p. 156. ² House of Commons, Hansard, 12 June 1979, col 246. ³ J. Tomlinson, ‘Crowding out’, History and Policy, 5 December, 2010; https://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/crowding-out⁴ J. Delingploe, ‘Britain’s trillion pound horror story’, The Spectator, 13 November, 2010. ⁵ J. A. Hobson, The Industrial System, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1909. ⁶ C. Breuer, ‘Expansionary austerity and reverse causality: a critique of the conventional approach’, New York, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper no. 98, July 2019. ⁷ D. Blanchflower, Not Working, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 172. ⁸ A. Stirling, ‘Austerity is subduing UK economy by more than £3,600 per household this year’, New Economics Foundation, 2019; https://neweconomics.org/2019/02/austerity-is-subduing-uk-economy-by-more-than-3-600-per-household-this-year⁹ R. C. Jump, J. Michell, J. Meadway and N. Nascimento, The Macroeconomics of Austerity, Progressive Economy Forum, March 2023; https://progressiveeconomyforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/pef_23_macroeconomics_of_austerity.pdf¹⁰ See S. Lansley, The Richer, The Poorer, How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor, Bristol, Policy Press, 2022. ¹¹ K. Buchholtz, Where Social Spending is Highest and Lowest, Statistica, 28 January, 2021; https://www.statista.com/chart/24050/social-spending-by-country/¹² OECD, The Covid-19 Crisis and State Ownership in the Economy, Paris, OECD, 2021; https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/the-covid-19-crisis-and-state-ownership-in-the-economy-issues-and-policy-considerations-ce417c46/¹³ L. Chancel, World Inequality Report, World Inequality Database, 2021. ¹⁴ High Pay Centre/TUC, How the Shareholder-first Model Contributes to Poverty, Inequality and Climate Change, TUC, 2019. ¹⁵ National Audit Office, ‘Transforming Rehabilitation: Progress Review’, National Audit Office, 1 March 2019; https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/transforming-rehabilitation-progress-review/¹⁶ V. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, New York, Augustus M. Kelley, 1896. ¹⁷ Lansley, The Richer, The Poorer. ¹⁸ T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisured Classes, New York, The Modern Library, 1899; T. Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System, New York, B. W. Huebsch, 1921. ¹⁹ I. Cairo and J. Sim, Market Power, Inequality and Financial Instability, Washington DC, Federal Reserve, 2020. ²⁰ L. Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty, London, Methuen, 1905, pp. 41–3. ²¹ C. Masterman, The Condition of England, Madrid, Hardpress Publishing, 2013; H. George, Progress and Poverty, New York, Cosimo Inc., 2006, p. 12. ²² J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1958, ch. 23. ²³ F. Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth, Abingdon, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 190. ²⁴ R. H. Tawney, ‘Poverty as an industrial problem’, inaugural lecture at the LSE, reproduced in Memoranda on the Problems of Poverty, London, William Morris Press, 1913. ²⁵ V. Chick, A. Pettifor and G. Tily, The Economic Consequences of Mr Osborne: Fiscal Consolidation: Lessons from a Century of UK Macroeconomic Statistics, London, Prime, 2016; G. Tily, ‘From the doom loop to an economy for work not wealth’, TUC, February, 2023; https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/doom-loop-economy-work-not-wealth²⁶ Chancellor of the Exchequer, Autumn Statement, 2022, Gov.uk, 17 November, 2022; https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/autumn-statement-2022

This article was first published in The Political Quarterly 

‘

Biography

• Stewart Lansley is the author of The Richer, The Poorer: How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor, a 200-year History, 2021. He is a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol and an Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

picture credit flickr

The post Rethinking ‘Crowding Out’ and the Return of ‘Private Affluence and Public Squalor’ appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

Ten Years and Counting…

In 2009, we wrote The Spirit Level, based on our work as epidemiologists researching the social determinants of health and wellbeing. We showed, emphatically, that greater equality – a smaller gap between rich and poor – is the fundamental basis of a better society. The more equal of the rich, developed countries have resoundingly better physical and mental health, which is part of the reason why they weathered the storm of Covid-19 better than more unequal countries.

But economic inequality, and its intersection with inequalities related to ethnicity, gender, disability, language, religion and more, is not just a health issue. In The Spirit Level we showed that all the problems that are more common at the bottom of society, that have a social gradient, get worse with greater inequality. And that body of evidence has continued to grow in the years since, based on our own research and the work of many others across the world. In addition to shorter life expectancy, higher death rates and levels of chronic disease, increased obesity, mental illness and poor child wellbeing, more unequal societies suffer from more violence, including homicides, domestic violence, child maltreatment and bullying. Children and young people do less well in school and have lower chances of social mobility and higher rates of dropping out and teenage births. Drug and alcohol abuse, problem gambling, status consumption and consumerism also rise with inequality, while levels of trust and solidarity, and civic and cultural participation decline.

Countries that tend to do well on any one of these measures tend to do well on all of them, and the ones that perform badly do badly on most or all of them. And not only is the impact of inequality wide-ranging, differences between countries are large; and although the poor are worst affected, inequality affects almost everybody.

And that means that the UK is trailing behind the countries to which we usually compare ourselves, on that long list of problems, and that all of us – young or old, male or female, in the North or the South, rich or poor – ALL OF US, are damaged. We are each at higher individual risk, and our whole society is ground down and trapped by inequality: we, and it, fail to thrive.

We’ve used a robust framework analysis to show that this is a causal problem and we’ve done a lot of work to understand the pathways through which inequality does the damage.³ We know that tackling inequality is the central task in responding to the multiple crises we face: the climate crisis, the cost of living crisis, the North-South divide, food insecurity, the gig economy, threats to our democracy.  Inequality is at the heart of it all.

The lost decade

When The Spirit Level was published we were at first heartened by the political response to the research. Politicians across the political spectrum seemed to understand the evidence and inequality seemed to take its rightful place on the political agenda.

But what has happened in the UK since then – a decade of austerity, followed by a global pandemic, and now a cost of living crisis, means we’re just as unequal now as we were then. And every crisis that comes along seems to be another engine of increasing inequality. 

Who suffered from the Global Financial Crisis? Average real incomes declined, and that was particularly true for the youngest and lowest paid workers.  Who were most likely to be exposed to Covid, to be infected, to be really sick, to die? Death rates were twice as high in the most deprived areas of the UK as in the most affluent. And we know who is already suffering most from rising prices, rising interest rates in the cost of living crisis – those on low incomes, on benefits, families with children, especially lone parents and everyone living outside of London and the south east.

And in all three of these crises, it hasn’t simply been a matter of the poor getting poorer.  In these big existential crises, the rich have got richer, a lot richer.  In the years following the Global Financial Crisis, the world’s richest 1% increased their wealth until they owned more than the bottom half of the world’s entire population. Top investors made billions by buying up shares in failing banks, betting against housing markets that were foreclosing on the mortgages of the poor, basically “buying when there’s blood in the streets” to realize massive gains during recovery. The pay of the FTSE 100 chief executives has sky rocketed, unlike that of their workers. During the pandemic, the rich accumulated wealth, including from government procurement under emergency regulations with lowered scrutiny for corruption. Oil and gas companies have made huge profits since the energy crisis began, and their chief executives continue to be paid millions, some of them many millions.- Huge pay and benefits packages and dividends have enriched the chief executives and shareholders of the UK’s water companies despite their abysmal record on tackling leaks, pollution and investment in new reservoirs.

We need the right (left) kind of active government

The Coalition and Conservative governments have certainly been active since 2010. They have actively failed to tackle inequality; they have acted to benefit the rich and harm the rest of us. Their actions speak much louder than their hollow words on levelling up.

An Active Labour Government could do so much to transform our society from the failing, unproductive, harmful state it is in, to one that promotes and, crucially, achieves the welfare and wellbeing of all its citizens. An active government that puts wellbeing first through tackling inequality would see spin-off benefits and savings across health, education, social care, law enforcement and more.

The courage to change

Labour should take heart from the progressive preferences of British citizens. When polled, the large majority of the public are in favour of progressive policies that are too often dismissed as radical, utopian, or unfeasible by the press or the Westminster bubble.

Close to 80% of the British public believe that the gap between those on high and low incomes is “too large” and this has been a consistent trend (varying between 72-85%) over the four decades that the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey has been running. In 2018, the BSA concluded that “the public are likely to have more of an appetite for policies aimed at addressing poverty and inequality than they did a decade ago.”

The majority of the British public want water, energy, rail, buses, Royal Mail and the NHS to be run in the public sector, and that includes the majority of Conservatives.

Recent academic research on public opinion research in “red wall” constituencies found consistently high levels of support for Universal Basic Income, even when the policy was presented to voters in terms used by its opponents. There is little evidence that voters with conservative social values – those in left behind communities in Labour’s former heartlands – won’t actually support radical social policy.

The vast majority of the public support action on climate change and they are much more worried about the costs of doing nothing than they are about the cost of tackling the problem.

The triple-win manifesto

So what should the Labour Party do?  We are not politicians, or even political scientists or policy experts.  But we do know that Labour needs a bold and compelling vision that brings people onside by painting a picture of a society that can respond to the climate emergency while at the same time transforming people’s lives for the better and creating sustainable  growth.

What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but six triple-win active policy options include:

• Joining WEGo, the Wellbeing Economy Governments (currently Canada, Scotland, Iceland, New Zealand, Wales and Finland), a collaboration of national and regional governments promoting sharing of expertise and transferrable policy practices for building wellbeing economies.  It is growth in wellbeing that we need, not growth in GDP.
• Committing to actually tackling inequality by taxing wealth, top incomes and financial transactions
• Giving people resilience and stability through a universal basic income and a proper living wage.
• Enacting the Socioeconomic Duty of the 2010 Equality Act
• Promoting fair work and economic democracy within a Green New Deal
• Putting children and young people at the centre of policy: recommit the country to ending child poverty; end selective education and remove charitable status from private schools; properly fund the comprehensive education system; enshrine in law universal free school meals and free holiday meals for families on benefits; and close the digital divide

Labour needs to act fast and boldly, with energising urgency, to make sure that the policies needed to tackle the climate emergency are politically acceptable to the public because they can see that they are part of a transformation to a fairer, better society in which they and their children and grandchildren can flourish.

What inspired progressive political change in the past was a vision of socialism, embodying the belief that a better society is possible for all of us.  The loss of that ideal has meant political hope has dwindled for so many.  Labour must build a new vision, firmly built on the foundations of an egalitarian and sustainable society.

Kate Pickett is a social epidemiologist, co-author of ‘The Spirit Level’ and ‘The Inner Level’ and co-founder of The Equality Trust.

Richard Wilkinson is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of York.

This article is published with permission from Labour Tribune MPs. It first appeared in a collection of essays published by Labour Tribune MPs in 2022 entitled “THE CHANGE WE NEED : How a Starmer Government can Transform Britain”

Further Reading

Wilkinson RG, Pickett K. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. London: Penguin; 2010.

Pickett KE, Wilkinson RG. Income inequality and health: a causal review. Social Science & Medicine 2015;128:316-26

Wilkinson R, Pickett K. The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everybody’s wellbeing. London: Allen Lane; 2018.

Greater Manchester Independent Inequalities Commission. The Next Level: Good Lives for All in Greater Manchester, 2020: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/4337/gmca_independent-inequalities-commission_v15.pdf

Pickett K, Wilkinson R. Post-pandemic health and wellbeing: putting equality at the heart of recovery. In: Allen P, Konzelmann SJ, Toporowski J. The Return of the State: Restructuring Britain for the Common Good. London: Agenda Publishing, 2021.

Wilkinson R. If it doesn’t work for people, it won’t work for the planet. Club of Rome, 2021: https://www.clubofrome.org/blog-post/wilkinson-inequality-sustainability/

Reed H, Lansley S, Johnson M, Johnson E & Pickett KE. Tackling Poverty: the power of a universal basic income, London: Compass, 2022. Available at: https://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/tackling-poverty-the-power-of-a-universal-basic-income/

Johnson M, Nettle D, Johnson E, Reed H & Pickett KE. Winning the vote with a universal basic income: Evidence from the ‘red wall’. London, Compass, 2022.

Picture credit: flickr

The post Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson: Spirit Level Lessons appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

We are living in an age of chronic uncertainty, in which crises pile into one another, plunging millions of people deeper into insecurity, impoverishment, stress and ill-health. There was the financial crash of 2008, a decade of austerity, a series of six pandemics culminating in Covid, with more to follow, and now the ‘cost-of-living’ crisis as inflation mounts, possibly reaching an incredible 20% by the winter.

Nassim Taleb coined the term ‘black swans’ to designate shocks that were rare, unpredictable and had devastating consequences. Now, they are not rare. But they are uncertain in terms of when, where and why they occur and who will be adversely affected. As such, you and I cannot be confident that we will not be among the victims.

There is something else too. It looks as if a large proportion of the population will be affected. It is predicted, for example, that 45 million people in Britain will be suffering from fuel-related hardship this coming winter, bringing more deaths and ill-health. Natural disasters could hit numerous communities, and being in a job is far from a guarantee of escaping poverty or economic insecurity.

Three deductions should flow from this bleak scenario. First, feasible economic growth will not overcome the threats. Second, old policies are not valid for tackling the new crises. Third, we need to build societal resilience, a new income distribution system and a new social protection system. ‘Targeting’ on a minority would be futile and inequitable.

The post-war welfare state was built on a presumption of Full Employment of men in full-time jobs earning family wages, in which there was a need for compensation for ‘contingency risks’ or ‘temporary interruptions of earnings power’. It was always sexist. But the essence was ex post compensation. This is inappropriate today where the core challenge is chronic uncertainty, for which one cannot devise a social insurance system. What is needed is an ex ante protection system, one which gives everybody guaranteed basic security.

But our politicians are failing to appreciate the nature of the challenge and are resorting to yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s problems. First, the Conservative leadership contenders and the Labour leadership are making overriding commitments to maximising economic growth. Keir Starmer says that the Labour motif for the next General Election will be ‘Growth, Growth and Growth’, and that he will only consider policy proposals from the Shadow Cabinet if they promote growth. Meanwhile, an adviser to several Tory Chancellors says the next Conservative Prime Minister will commit to an ‘absolute priority of maximising growth’.

A phrase that comes to mind is the one used by Michael Gove to characterise Liz Truss: they are taking a holiday from reality. Both the Conservatives and Labour are misdiagnosing the nature of the recurrent crises. Both are chasing the mirage of high GDP growth, wishing away the awful ecological implications. Starmer says the free market has failed. But we do not have a free market. It is rentier capitalism, in which most income flows to the owners of property – financial, physical and ‘intellectual’. Economic growth has to be unrealistically high for the precariat and other low-income groups to gain anything. This is why real wages have stagnated over the past three decades, and why earnings have lagged GDP growth, the difference made up by rising debt.

The income distribution system has broken down. Across all OECD countries, financialisation has accelerated, and is fuelling inflation for its benefit. In the UK, financial assets of financial institutions have risen to over 1,000% of GDP, with most finance used for speculative activity rather than for productive investment.

A rising share of income is going to capital, and more is going in rent, in excess profits. Within the shrinking share going to labour, more has gone to the top, again in forms of rent. The value of wealth has risen sharply relative to income, while wealth inequality is much greater than income inequality.

All the time, the precariat grows. What should exercise progressive politicians is that for a growing proportion of the population income instability and insecurity have grown by more than is revealed by trends in average real wages. A result is that millions of people are living on the edge of unsustainable debt. People lack income resilience. Desirable as that is, raising the minimum wage will not solve that, and nor will trying to be King Canute in banning flexible labour relations.

So what are our politicians proposing in this context of chronic uncertainty, a broken income distribution system and a daunting ecological crisis? What marks all of what they are offering is ad hoc window dressing that seems deliberately intended to avoid the reality that we have a transformation crisis on our hands. Tax cuts would benefit the relatively secure, price freezes would cost the public finances and distort markets, raising the minimum wage would bypass the precariat and those outside the labour market, and targeting more benefits to those receiving Universal Credit would merely bolster an unspeakably punitive and inequitable scheme.

It brings to mind what William Beveridge wrote in supporting his 1942 Report that led to the post-1945 welfare state. ‘It’s a time for revolutions, not for patching.’ So far, our mainstream politicians seem to lack the backbone. The strategy should be one of dismantling rentier capitalism and recycling rental incomes to everybody. Above all, in the foreseeable future of chronic economic, social and ecological uncertainty, the base of social protection should be the provision of ex ante security. People – all of us – must know that, whatever the shock, we will have the wherewithal on which to survive and recover.

This is when politicians should be looking at ways of introducing a basic income for every usual resident. It would not replace all existing benefits, and would have to involve supplements for those with special needs. It would have to start at a modest level, but would be paid to each man and woman, equally and individually, without means-testing or behavioural conditionality. Legal migrants would have to wait for a period, which does not mean they should not be assisted by other means. And to overcome the objection that it should not be paid to the rich, tax rates could be adjusted to make them more progressive.

Before coming to how to pay for it, I want to emphasise the reasons for wanting a basic income for all. The fundamental justification is moral or ethical.

First, it is a matter of common justice. Our income owes far more to the contributions of all our ancestors than to anything we do ourselves. Even Warren Buffet admits that. But as we cannot know whose ancestors created more or less, we should all have an equal ‘dividend’ on the public wealth. After all, if we allow the private inheritance of private wealth, there should be a public equivalent. The Pope has come round to that rationale for his support for basic income. It is also a matter of ecological justice, since the rich cause most of the pollution while the poor pay most of the costs, primarily in diminished health. A basic income would be a form of compensation.

Second, it would enhance personal freedom, including community freedom. Although paid individually, that would not make it individualistic. Experiments have shown that when everybody has basic income, that induces stronger feelings of social solidarity, altruism and tolerance.

Third, it would enhance basic security, in a way that means-tested, conditional benefits cannot possibly do. Politicians seem reluctant to offer ordinary people basic security, which they would always want for themselves and their families. Insecurity corrodes intelligence and induces stress and loss of the capacity to make rational decisions. We are experiencing a pandemic of stress and rising morbidity. None of the existing policy proposals would reduce that.

Finally, there are instrumental reasons. Experiments with basic income around the world have shown it results in improved mental health, less stress, better physical health, more work, not less, and enhanced social and economic status of women and people with disabilities.   

Basic income is not a panacea, but it should be part of a transformational strategy, complemented by putting public utilities, most notably water, back in public hands and by rent and energy price controls. There must also be fiscal reform that would help in the fight against the ecological decay while helping to overcome chronic uncertainty. Progressives should accept that taxes on income and consumption should be raised, because they are relatively low in this country and because more revenue is needed to pay for our public services, and in particular reverse the privatisation of our precious health service.

The call for Universal Basic Services is state paternalism and would not help with the nature of the crisis. People need financial resources to overcome the economic uncertainty and lack of resilience. No government can know the particular needs of particular people, and so subsidising some services would be both arbitrary and distortionary.

However, in addition to higher taxes on income to pay for services, we should think of ‘the commons’, that is, all that inherently belongs to every citizen of the UK, beginning with the land, air, water and sea, and the minerals and energy underneath. Over the centuries, they have been taken from us illegitimately, without us or our ancestors being compensated. This includes all the land that has been ‘enclosed’, the forest and public spaces that are being ‘privatised’, the seabed that is being auctioned off, and the oil and gas sold for windfall gains given away in tax cuts for the wealthy.

This line of reasoning leads to the proposal that levies should be put on elements of the commons that we have lost, with the revenue put into a Commons Capital Fund, which would be charged with making ecologically sustainable investments, from which ‘common dividends’ would be paid out equally to every resident citizen.

The initial base for paying for a basic income would be conversion of the personal income tax allowance, which benefits higher-income earners and contradicts the view that in a good society everybody should be a taxpayer. If the revenue from that were put into the Fund, it would provide enough for £48 a week for every adult. Then add a 1% wealth tax, justifiable because wealth has risen from three times GDP to seven times, wealth inequality is much greater than income inequality and over 60% of wealth is inherited, unearned. A 1% wealth tax would be sufficient to pay a modest basic income. And more revenue could be raised by rolling back on many of the 1,190 subsidies and tax breaks given mostly to wealthy people. A modest Land Value Tax, based on size and value of land, is also justifiable on common justice grounds, especially as the value of land has grown from an already high 39% of non-financial assets in 1995 to 56% in 2020.

Then add a Carbon Tax, vital if we are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, but which will only be politically popular and feasible if all the revenue from it is recycled as part of Common Dividends. Other levies into the Fund could include a Frequent Flyer Levy and a Dirty Fuel Levy on all those cruise liners and container ships that keep their engines going all the time they are in port, poisoning the atmosphere and causing widespread throat cancer.   

Here we have the basis of an income distribution system suited to the era, with supplements for all those with extra needs. It is an approach that would open up a vista of multiple forms of work, unpaid as well as paid, putting care at its centre. It would be an era in which basic security was regarded as a fundamental right, and it would be one in personal freedom would be enhanced while precarity would be reduced, the precarity that comes from dependency on a discretionary state and undignified charity. At this moment of omni-crisis, we need to march in that direction.            

Postscript:

In their response to the cost-of-living crisis, the New Economics Foundation proposes ‘free basic energy’ for all households. Besides penalising those outside households, this presumes that all households’ poverty and insecurity is due to high energy prices. For many that will be so, but for some other factors may be more important.

It would also raise moral hazards. Some people may not need the full free allocation, but would be inclined to waste what they did not need, because it was free. The amount given free would have to be based on some ‘average’ household. But many are in non-average households, or are outside them more, for whom the free allocation would be too little or exceed our basic need.

Some people might prefer to cut energy use a little if given the choice of spending on food, debt reduction or extra clothing. Better to enable them to make the choice that suits their particular needs.

The NEF also propose to top-up Universal Credit and legacy benefits. But we know these do not reach many of the poor, due to sanctions, the humiliating application process and long delays. What about the millions in need who would be excluded? Much better than relying on paternalistic measures and behaviour-conditioned targeted benefits would be a basic income, with supplements for those with special needs, coupled with a modest wealth tax and land value tax. 

Guy Standing is a Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London and a council member of the Progressive Economy Forum. His new book is The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea, published by Pelican. He is a technical adviser to the basic income pilot being conducted by the Government of Wales.  

photo credit flickr

The post An Era of Chronic Uncertainty: Time for Basic Income appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

The digital symposium was produced throughout the pandemic ‘lockdowns’ as they rolled across the globe in 2020-2021, the purpose was to speak across the silos of academic disciplines to ask what is the state of the art in terms of what is known about inequality? Why is knowing about inequality important? The purpose was to connect academic research to practical, inclusive and innovative solutions to inequality because it is the issue of our time. The Progressive Economy Forum was featured in podcast discussions of the edit collection, The Return of the State: Restructuring Britain for the Common Good (Agenda Press: 2019), by Patrick Allen, Sue Konzelmann, and Jan Toporowski, and Coordinator, James Meadway, contributes to the debates throughout. 

Progressive economic ideas thinks about inequality through the lens of distribution, rather than scarcity. When we think about what is just, we think about who gets what. A distributive paradigm looks at wealth and income levels, material goods and social position to evaluate the wellbeing of society. The term inequality measures the separations between groups within society, either at the national or global level, and asks whether these distributions are just. The digital symposium was a series of dialogues seeking to advance our thinking about what creates inequality as well as our considerations of how inequity touches our lives in really meaningful ways.

PEF Coordinator, Dr James Meadway draws out the distributive paradigm driving contemporary inequality via Piketty’s thesis,  ‘when returns to capital from wealth surpass those from employment, income inequality worsens’ – in order to connect economic ideas to the practical reality. Specifically, that the wealthiest 1% of people globally produce the same emissions as the poorest in the bottom half, over 3 billion people. Thomas Piketty ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ featured prominently in the dialogue because, as Paul Krugman articulated Piketty’s thesis changed the way economists in particular think and talk about wealth and inequality. This very point is discussed with Professor Mike Savage, from the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, as his newest book, ‘The Return of Inequality’, is considered the sociological reply to the Parisian economist. Savage calls for more iconoclastic thinking around inequality, a recognition that inheritance (via state tax policies tax income compared to wealth) isn’t just about passing on economic resources, but passing on cultural capacities. In recognising this, the true legacies of capitalism can be articulated. Indeed, colonialism is central to configuring global inequality – the historical geographies that inform global hierarchies of states by wealth and GPD. In national domestic economies income and wealth inequality connect to systems of race, gender and class as social stratifications. Combining understandings of the weight of history, with the economic frames of income and wealth, reveals the conditions that create and reproduce inequality between groups.

The role of the state in generating, perpetuating and/or addressing inequality is discussed in terms of how economic ideas are applied in the exercise of public policy. This is the context, the dialogue asked if we change how we think and talk about inequality, what really changes? We can understand inequality in all its guises, we can measure it in all kinds of different ways, we can agree, it’s an urgent economic and social policy, but nothing changes if this knowledge is not put to good use. Fatalism is not an option. We are social beings, the greatest problem solvers on the planet (according to David Attenborough), and we can build a better, more sustainable and equitable way of living. For practical solutions, there are plenty of examples of when inequality was not just a social problem, this suggests that changes in economic ideas that inform public policies can lead to improvement or worsening of inequality. Having established that inequality is not just a personal experience of extreme poverty or exorbitant wealth, we consider how widening inequality impacts political stability and social cohesion. 

The Return of the State, is featured in the symposium discussion on how what starts in the economy as income and wealth inequality radiates outward through society and politics in ways that generate polarization. What effect does inequality have on the balance between the state, the market and society? In turn, what effect can social democracy have on addressing inequality? The discussion begins with a need to stop talking about equality as a playing field. When policy makers frame inequality in this way, they are putting people on opposing teams to compete in a winner takes all game of life. Imagine how much life would improve if governments framed equity as a ‘common good’ or a resource for society to draw on, providing widespread prosperity and cohesion rather than individual gains and division. Where ideas lead, practical solutions follow – so we must change how we think and talk about inequality, the issue of our time. 

PEF Council member, Sue Konzelmann contributes to the symposium by articulating how insecurity-cycles are engrained in economic policies that generate worsening inequality. She explains how historically and geographically different economic policy regimes inform distributive paradigms (who gets’ what) which either worsen or improve inequality. Economic ideas are central to understanding why inequality exists where it does, but also points to what policy levers to pull to promote greater equity in society. Throughout the dialogues the tension between seeing inequality as systemic, rather than an individual or personal (moral) failing, is why the state via public policies is so important in shaping inequality. For instance, the role of the state is seen as central to how finance shapes contemporary inequality. This point is expressed clearly in Lisa Adkins, and Martjin Konings contribution to the dialogue in their discussion of their new book, ‘The Asset Economy’, which articulate how the foundational shift in center of gravity capitalism from a commodities-based economy to an asset-based economy creates a system of ‘lock-in’ via residential housing, which is a key aspect of inequality in urban centers across the globe. In the Asset economy, wealth is accumulated because asset prices increase at a faster rate than wages and consumer prices – having family wealth or inheritance have become more important than income in contributing to financial security through asset ownership. 

PEF Council member, Jan Toporowski, contributes to the dialogues with key reflections on the systems of oppression that underpin asset, income and wealth inequality. Looking historically at industrial feudalism and contemporary financialized capitalism and how these epochs shape the intimacies of life – not simply as labour but also in terms of age, race, gender, and where you live. He articulates the key points where economics meets social configurations of oppression by excluding groups from wealth accumulation via barriers to accessing employment and finance, which are the only routes to holding assets, besides inheritance of course. This reflection summarizes the arc of the dialogue on key fault lines of inequality. For instance, the transformation of residential housing as the site where employment, debt and assets come together and appear in everyday life. The home evolved from a place where people live, into an asset, and then to an asset in which capital gains are expected. Housing has been promoted by governments as a form of welfare, a way of providing for one’s own security and that of your family, central to the narrative of self-reliance above state provision. Mehrsa Baradaran, ‘The Color of Money’ examines how marginalised groups are adversely incorporated into the financial system: “Just as exploitative credit arrangements, like sharecropping were created because of the demand for worldwide cotton, subprime lending was connected to the worldwide demand for mortgage loans. Global capital markets found yield in the cotton produced by sharecroppers and in the interest paid by subprime borrowers. That the black community was exploited in both situations speaks to their lack of wealth, political power and their exclusion from the main channels of financial power.” Having to access financial markets in order to access the basic provisions of life, like housing, is deeply entangled with the discrimination of historically marginalized groups in society. Interestingly, in addition to racial inequalities, this dynamic can also be seen in age-cohorts. For young people, access to family wealth they can use for a down payment on a property gives them a decisive advantage over those without, even if they earn more money. What becomes clear is that whether an asset or a debt, it is the deeper integration of finance into everyday life that shapes the fortunes and misfortunes of society.

In conclusion, many people already recognize inequities in everyday life whether as categories of inequality, such as being poor, experiencing racial or gender discrimination, also inequity can be seen in the differential experiences of climate breakdown or the historical geographies of colonialism. Those least responsible for society’s ills are suffering disproportionately, breeding further division in society. This podcast miniseries articulates why inequality is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century –  it erodes prosperity and destabilises society. Inequality is another word for the serious, deeply unjust, social challenges facing human society which are systemic, woven into the very fabric of daily life. Progressive economics provides a set of economic ideas that can bring greater cohesion to solve collective problems, whether inequality, climate change or the threat of a viral pandemic.

The post ‘The Return of the State’ is central to addressing inequality  appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

Latest inflation figures from the Office for National Statistics put average price rises in the 12 months to September at 4.2%, its highest rate of growth since November 2011. Back then, a post-financial crisis surge in prices pushed inflation to above 5%, and it stayed high until mid-2014 when OPEC’s decision to maintain oil production helped bring down prices across the globe.

Whilst last year’s lockdowns and subsequent recessions kept inflation very low, as we would expect – with spending falling dramatically, there is little to no pressure to raise prices – reopening since earlier this year has coincided with a dramatic rise in prices. Despite some optimistic claims that this would be “transitory” shift in prices, dependent solely on the unusual demand conditions caused by reopening, nearly 12 months it is harder to sustain the view.

Some of this is due to Brexit, which even prior to Britain’s exit from the EU had pushed domestic inflation up as a result of the fall in the value of the pound, relative to other currencies, after the 2016 referendum. But most of it is from the bigger impact – global, even – of covid-19. Developed countries across the world are seeing similar combinations of supply chain stresses, shortages of key goods, rising energy prices, and higher inflation.

The big question in all this is whether these price rises will fade away as the initial shock of the pandemic wears off – perhaps stretching out into next year, but not much further – or whether they will become entrenched, moving us into a permanently higher inflation regime.

Incorrect models and tighter monetary policy

More conventional Keynesian economists would be far happier with a temporary surge in prices, since the usual belief is that price rises register an economy that is “overheating”: too much demand chasing too little supply and that (therefore) governments should either cut their own spending, raise taxes or, if they are unwilling or unable to do either of those two, to raise interest rates. So persistently high inflation tends to lead to demands for interest rate rises – which, of course, are now starting to happen. Central banks’ own mandates are typically, in this era of their “independence”, modelled on the “Taylor Rule” linking interest rates to inflation, with rates increases mandated as inflation also rises. The Bank of England avoided this temptation at last month’s rate-setting meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee, but the voices demanding a tightening of monetary policy are getting louder.

Latest in this growing chorus is the Financial Times’ widely-read chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, who sees today the first glimmerings of a return to the 1970s: “as price rises became more general and real wages were being eroded, workers became increasingly militant. Finally, a general wage-price spiral became all too visible.”

Under circumstances where strike numbers in Britain remain close to their lowest since records began, where union membership in the private sector is amongst the lowest in the developed world and – crucially – where average wage growth has been near-zero for a decade, a “general wage-price spiral” should be the last concern anyone has right now. Frankly, a little more “union militancy” would be good for the economy – pay rises would pull back on skyrocketing inequality, and put more money into the hands of people who are more likely to spend it.

But Wolf, instead, sees the problem of pay rises as being one in which inflation can move from being merely “transitory”, driven by exceptional post-lockdown circumstances, and moves into a permanent or at least long-run problem. He cites US economist Jason Furman as noting a tightening of labour markets, with “seven unemployed workers for every 10 openings”. Rattling around in people’s heads is the idea that, if pay rises are won by workers, these will turn into firms putting up prices, causing further demands for wage increases, and so forcing firms to raise prices again, and so on. This is the “wage-price spiral” Wolf refers to.

But the evidence from the last decade is that the British labour market, at least, has not been functioning like this. From mid-2014 onwards, as the OPEC “reverse oil price shock” worked its way through the global economy, inflation has consistently undershot both forecasts and the Bank of England’s own target – and this despite ultra-loose monetary policy of near-zero base rate and huge Quantitative Easing. Austerity, and the public sector wage freeze, certainly played its part, undermining the ability of those seeking work or in employment to bargain for higher pay. But so, too, does the “flexible” labour market, especially after 2010, with its mass creation of deeply insecure, low-paid work like the notorious zero hour contracts.

A model of the economy that didn’t include this extraordinary undermining of labour’s bargaining position – that instead assumed something closer to the labour market institutions of the 1970s were still in place – would be one that persistently overestimates inflation. This happened in the 2010s, and, to the extent that people think a wage-price spiral is a realistic possibility, and blame inflation on it, I think it’s happening again today. And to the extent that this leads to inappropriate calls for monetary policy tightening, it will cause problems today, too.

The real causes of persistent inflation

However, Wolf and others are right to worry about inflation becoming persistent, even if the mechanism they imply isn’t quite there. One part of this is the argument made by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan about demographics: that the exceptionally loose labour markets of the last forty years, the product of two enormous one-time expansions of the global labour force as China and Eastern Europe were integrated into it, are now tightening as this demographic exception approaches retirement. There is no second China out there. There will be no further loosening of labour markets in the future. And so wages, and – in their argument – prices and interest rates will finally start to rise.

It’s an interesting (and intuitive) argument that, incidentally, calls into question some cherished beliefs about the role of central bank “independence” in promoting low inflation over the last two decades or so. And for those with one eye on inequality, it holds out the possibility that the great shift in power towards capital and away from labour that characterised the neoliberal period may finally be coming to an end. This would, of course, over time move us back towards a kind of 1970s world, with higher inflation, higher interest rates – but also, potentially, stronger worker organisation able to win higher pay and better conditions, just like Wolf and others think already exists.

But the other part is significantly less positive. What Wolf calls “special factors”, citing the “surging price of gas” are likely to become less special over time. If there’s a disconnect between some conventional macro modelling and the reality of how labour markets have behaved in the last decade or more, there’s an even bigger disconnect between macro modelling and the reality of environmental decay. As a point of construction, conventional macroeconomic models tend to assume that, whatever is happening today, strong forces in the economy will pull it back to a stable growth path in the long run. But for this to happen, the conditions for growth to occur must themselves be stable. When all our environmental models are saying (for example) that extreme weather events, crop failures and disease outbreaks are all going to become more frequent, the assumption of environmental stability no longer applies.

So if (for another example) there is a frost in Brazil that has damaged coffee production, helping drive its price up to a seven year high today, that is a one-off shock that we would expect to fade away over time – prices would rise once, but the impact on inflation would disappear, since inflation measures price increases over time. But this seemingly one-off, specific environmental shock will be followed by other, similar shocks in the future, most likely at an increasing frequency: more droughts, more frosts, more wildfires and so on. The result will be a sustained increase in costs and prices: or, in other words, higher inflation.

It’s environmental breakdown that we should be worrying today’s inflation hawks, not the possibility of workers winning pay rises. And the prescription for dealing with this kind of ecological ratchet on prices is the exact opposite to the hawk’s usual package: not interest rate rises, but low rates to encourage investment and expand supply – particularly targeting ecological investment, as the People’s Bank of China is now doing. And not panic about rising wages but an insistence that the costs of ecological decline should be borne fairly, with pay increases across the board – paid for out of profits and interest as needed.

The post Inflation is here to stay, but not for the reasons you think – a response to Martin Wolf appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

The pandemic has exposed how dependent on care we are not only as individuals, but as a society. But our care system, already struggling well before the outbreak of the coronavirus, has failed to cope. Care work is poorly-paid and insecure, whilst the entire system suffers from chronic underfunding. Government promises to fix the system have concentrated only on funding, which is important, but falls well short of a comprehensive plan for care.

This new essay from PEF Council member Susan Himmelweit puts today’s crisis in its border context. A new approach is needed, recognising the immense importance of care to our economy and society, with care work properly supported in all its forms, effective support from the public sector, and an integration of the care system into our wider social and physical infrastructure.

The post New PEF publication – Care and the Pandemic appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

PEF Council members recently discussed, via email, the government’s plans for social care and its financing. We were unanimous in agreeing on the bad design of the scheme, on the absence of real funding and reform for social care. And we also agreed on the need for a significant shift in the balance of taxation towards wealth. The points of contention are around how the latter should take place and a macroeconomics that might help explain why.

Stewart Lansley

The case for financing social care through wealth is overwhelming. There are two broad options: first, the 2010 Burnham Plan, which means all those needing care would keep their home and a charge made at death. Alternatively, an annual property charge of say 1% pa up to say a maximum of 5%. Both of these could be paid into a social care fund, as argued in Remodelling Capitalism.

The last two decades have seen a great surge in asset values and unearned wealth (what John Stuart Mill called “getting rich in your sleep”), notably in property. The total value of personal wealth in the UK in 2018 was £14.6 tr of which property is £5tr and financial wealth £2.2tr – so a hypothetical one per cent tax on all property and financial wealth would yield £70bn a year, and just on property would be £50bn per year. Any such tax should be charged on assets above a certain level, which would then yield less than the estimates given here.

Yet the tax take from wealth is tiny, with the UK tax system disproportionately dependent on taxing income. In 2015/6, the combined revenue from existing capital taxes – stamp duty on property transactions and shares, capital gains and inheritance tax but excluding council tax – raised about £27bn a year, some 3.9% of all tax revenue.  This accounts for less than one per cent of total private asset holdings.

The case for higher taxation on personal and corporate wealth is being widely recognized. Before the 2017 November budget, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research proposed an annual tax on net wealth (assets minus liabilities) above £700,000 (including residential property) to replace three existing capital taxes on inheritance tax, capital gains and dividends. A tax set at 2 per cent would raise £72 billion (gross).

The scheme would may have been unpopular in 2010, but might be much more popular now given that the public accept that we need to find a way of paying for social care and are unconvinced by Johnson’s plan. This is surely an area where KS should be out with all guns blazing!

Danny Dorling

I was one of the people earlier suggesting taxing wealth would be difficult. I don’t think I explained myself well. It is not the taxing of wealth that is difficult, that is easy. Ireland showed how it could be done on property with a progressive property tax where the percentage taken rose according to the value of property. They did it in an extremely short amount of time when forced to by the Troika in the Eurozone crisis at the start of the last decade. When that process began, they had no “gazetteer” – no universal register of properties – let alone any decent sets of valuations.

The best systems of wealth taxation make paying the tax annually part of the way you claim and maintain a record of your ownership of property. You can chose not to pay the wealth tax if you wish to gift that wealth to the state. You can also argue that your property is worth less than the valuation of the state. However, when you then come to sell that property, you may find that buyers don’t wish to pay more than you have said it is worth. Wealth taxes should also decrease the value of property which would not be a bad thing. So my concern is not with the idea of wealth taxes.

My concern is with suggesting it – and suggesting introducing a wealth tax to pay for the NHS/Social Care, without suggesting all the other mitigations you would do at the very same time that would make it appear plausible to many people.

But so many mitigations are needed that you end up needing a whole manifesto to explain them. I’ll give just one example. A large group of people in their 40s and 50s who have managed to get a mortgage now talk of their home as their pension. Their various precarious jobs have meant they have no decent pension, and although they may now be being auto enrolled into a pension. It is not one where they can envisage a future of being able to “keep the thermostat on 17 in their old age” as it was recently put to me by one home owner (still paying off their mortgage, and with the annual average income of the UK). What they plan to do is sell their home when they retire, downsize and use part of the savings to (among other things) pay the gas bill in winter.

If we suggest a wealth tax, taxing away a slice of what they see as their savings every year without also suggesting how pensions will be improved, then in the mind of someone in that position your policy will condemn them to an old age of being cold. Gas and electric bills have just risen very quickly so these bills are on peoples’ minds at the moment. In effect, for them a wealth tax is an annual tax on their future pension. And quite a low pension at that.

I think this is one of the dangers of talking about raising a new tax to pay for one thing, when all the others things are not considered.

My preference is to keep taxing and spending separate, not hypothecated. So talk about rebalancing the tax system to make it fairer – with the emphasis always on fairness. And I would bring the overall level up to what is normal in Germany (almost identical to what Labour promised in their 2019 manifesto). Talk about bringing in taxes on wealth solely for the purpose of increasing fairness, not to pay for a particular policy, but also partly to allow other less fair taxes to be reduced, and partly to allow overall public spending to be at normal European levels.

On spending, we shouldn’t talk too much about the amounts of money in each sector, but much more about what it is you actually want to see. Something that is very good need not be very expensive. The Finns spend less as a share of GDP on their school than we do on ours, but their schools are much better. In contrast, we spend an enormous amount on our now almost entirely privatised universities, but we don’t see that as a tax. In the USA, they have the highest spending on health care in the world – and in general poor health.

I’ll stop there, but hope it helps explain my worry about suggestions of introducing a wealth tax to pay for health and social care.

Josh Ryan-Collins

I agree governments should not hypothecate (and I’m amazed HMT broke its own golden rule on that in this case) both because it can lead to less politically popular services getting neglected but also because it embeds the idea that we can’t pay for stuff unless we raise the money first which is simply not the case in sovereign currency issuing nations.

Having said this, the Tories have hypothecated and they have just implemented the biggest tax rise in living memory indicating (perhaps) a seismic shift towards the centre on economic policy. This threatens Labour in quite a serious way if they can’t differentiate themselves effectively.  The way to differentiate is to focus less on the amount of tax needed and for what (as you say Danny and Sue) but on how that tax should be raised and from whom in a way that is both socially just and economically sensible.

It is not sensible to be withdrawing purchasing power from workers and businesses when the economy remains fragile. But the even bigger issue is that tax needs to be seen as a key tool via which issues like inequality and falling productivity can be addressed via pushing against economic rents and favouring investment and wages.  This NIC tax hike broadly does the opposite. If you make your money from rental income, interest fees or capital gains, don’t pay a penny more, in contrast to workers and firms. The chart below from Resolution Foundation shows how crazy the situation is:

Will Hutton

I am all for taxing capital and am in violent agreement that too much capital taxation has been allowed to atrophy: no revaluation of residential property since 1991 so that council tax yields a fraction of the old rates, de facto semi-voluntary inheritance tax, too low capital gains tax, etc. During the 1945-50 Labour government tax on estates ran at 10 per cent of all tax revenues. There is huge scope to increase capital taxes, and as Josh has argued, property is immovable.

Stephany Griffith-Jones

I agree with Will on practically all points – including the extraordinary absence of  a revaluation of residential property since 1991, which includes periods when Labour was in power! An effective and fairly high inheritance tax is very desirable, as one of the structural problems is perpetuation of wealth concentration via inheritance.

Stewart Lansley

Just on Danny’s points:

1. ONS wealth figures are net wealth and any wealth tax on residential property would be net of mortgage debt, so Danny’s examples would not be affected. 

2. Yes, we must do more to make the existing taxation of income fairer, for example by reform of National Insurance system, but this would not be enough on its own to create a more equal society. 

3. As I argued in Return of the State, we are close to the limits of income taxation, So if we want to raise funds for improving social provision we need to turn to  asset-redistribution, though this would require taking public with us. Wealth is much more unequally distributed than income –  Top fifth hold 64 % of personal net wealth and 80% of financial wealth – and unless we tackle that we will not be able to reduce inequality and poverty on a sustainable basis.  It’s perfectly possible to design a wealth tax system that is concentrated on top wealth holders. 

Geoff Tily 

The TUC have argued that reforming Capital Gains Tax is a much fairer way to fund social care than hiking workers’ and businesses’ national insurance contributions.  But like President Biden’s notion of “work not wealth”, I want to make a broader macro argument that the interests of wealth and of labour are fundamentally opposed.  

My Keynes Betrayed was concerned with restoring Keynes’s conclusion that the long-term rate of interest must be set permanently low. Since I have been at the TUC, it occurs to me that this rate should interpreted more broadly as the return to capital/wealth and should be compared with the return to labour. Keynes’s conclusion that “we must avoid [dear money] … as we would hell-fire” (Collected Works XXI, p. 389) then means that we orient the system to the interests of wealth at our peril.    

The below chart shows a measure of the real (inflation-adjusted) long-term interest on US corporate debt, going beyond the normal comparisons of rates on government bonds. Even this doesn’t capture well the experience since the global financial crisis, but plainly we know full well what has happened to the broader return to wealth versus the return to labour over the past decade. (I suspect US investment grade corporate debt has simply become increasingly regarded as retreating from risk – and this goes right back to dot.com bubble.) “Dear money” can be seen coming in rapidly from 1979 (in parallel to the ‘Volcker shock’), and interest rates were sustained some way above the post-war levels (and back to the 1920s).  

US real interest rate

Josh’s chart from the Resolution Foundation is a nice one, not least because the timing of the key dislocation matches well the restoration of dear money on the above. Above all, this rise in returns to assets is a consequence, not a cause, of dear money.

Previously I had argued (following the General Theory chapter 22) that macroeconomic disarray comes in through overinvestment, but now I like a broader over-production/under-consumption (or rather, under-compensation) approach (it’s trade union friendly, has recently been revived by Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis [though Stuart Lansley had done so nearly a decade sooner], and is likely to be more correct!). Rather than spending to compensate for the underspending of labour, the wealthy speculate and so exacerbate over-production. This leads to unsustainable private debt, and ultimately meltdown; the fear here is Quantitative Easing has simply kicked the can down the road, with the risk of meltdown appearing later.    

Tax on the wealthy can be part of the solution (as in the opening of the final chapter of General Theory), but to restore the balance to labour requires wholesale macroeconomic change that operates on a global basis. Hence my recent argument that ‘internationalism begins at home’.  

We were convened in the first instance as a group inspired by Keynes, so I hope colleagues engage with this argument. On my view, it’s how Attlee, Dalton, Gaitskell, Bevin, Blum and FDR understood the world, helped them successfully to win office, and to begin to make real change.    

Jan Toporowski

The real con trick in the government’s proposals is the claim that this is a solution to the social care crisis, when the funding for that is being explicitly postponed until the difficulties in the NHS have been overcome. So the social care funding is conditional on that same funding being enough to overcome NHS difficulties, a most unlikely prospect. The electoral con is the message that the residual of working people on proper contracts will get in their payslips that their money is going to be spent by the government not once but twice to solve both health crises.

Guy Standing

One cannot sensibly discuss how to pay for social care without a systematic view of what care entails, which encompasses its messy definition, who should receive it, who should receive money being spent on it, how they should receive it, and so on. Once one opens the Pandora’s box one should realise that any hypothecated approach, as implied in what the Tories are doing, makes no sense whatsoever. Hypothecated taxation opens the door to the worst features of utilitarianism, 

The Government’s tax and NI rise is doubly regressive, since it lowers the earning of most paid carers at a time when their income and morale are abysmally low. If a government does not alter the structure of the so-called ‘social care industry’, the primary beneficiaries of pouring more money into it will be the private equity interests (mostly foreign capital) which are plundering money being spent on social care. Removing private equity should be a top priority. And any funding scheme that relies on means-testing will accentuate what is a highly regressive scheme, not reduce it.

More generally, there must be a huge shift in taxation from earned incomes to wealth of all kinds and to incursions into the commons, which means much increased eco-taxation. Ironically, incomes are nowadays the least taxable, with the UK being a rank outlier in the very high extent of tax evasion by high-income earners. But changing the incidence of taxation should be the secondary concern to the need to restructure the care sector. The social care crisis is a structural one, not primarily a fiscal one. Perhaps a Royal Commission should be set up to devise a proper plan for an integrated, universally-based system.

Sue Himmelweit

I agree strongly with Danny about not muddling up comments on taxing and with those on spending. But I don’t think that means that Labour should comment soley on alternative forms of taxation.

The first thing that has to be said about the so-called plan for social care is that it isn’t one, that it won’t be doing anything to improve provision nor even get back to the already failing system that we had in 2010. As the party that stands for protecting the vulnerable by collective provision this must be Labour’s first call. If they are commenting on a policy on social care, their first comment should be on social care and the need for it to be adequately funded (in the sense of enough spent on it), not on different forms of taxation. This should be true of PEF too!

Labour should also make clear that we could benefit from an overhaul of the tax system, so that it taxes, at the very least, gains in wealth. Reforming CGT so that is charged at the same rates as income tax with no specific tax allowance (except to exempt gains too small to count) would be a first step. And I would also like to see inheritance tax replaced by a receipts tax covering all ways of receiving wealth, also taxed at income tax rates (with some allowance for spreading a windfall over a few years). This way all ways of gaining wealth would be taxed at a reasonably high rate. This to me seems easier and more logical than taxing wealth itself at a low rate.

The post Should we tax wealth to fund social care? appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

I’ve written elsewhere on what a poor way the National Insurance Contribution (NICs) rise would be to fund the contribution cap, amounting to a perverse redistribution from mainly younger and poorer workers to at least some better off elderly. Almost any tax alternative currently on the table – from increasing income taxes, with its broader base, to Capital Gains Tax increases, to introducing a proper, progressive wealth tax – would be fairer and preferable.

That the NICs rise currently polls ahead of other options is a tribute to the framing of NICs (and the polling question asked!) more than anything else: it isn’t called a tax, and there’s still a firmly held belief that NICs payments go into a grand national pot that people can draw from later. This was the original intention of the system, dating back to the 1944 Beveridge Report and beyond, in which “national insurance” would act as a genuine, contributory insurance system, providing for those who had paid in during times of need. It has never really functioned like that: the Treasury, as its wont, has always treated NICs payments as just another flow of tax payments (with some slight complications).

But the seeming popularity of NICs rises is likely to prove fragile if the case against them is made, and – crucially – if the case for an alternative is clearly presented. Labour have now indicated that they will oppose the hike, but to clinch the argument they will need to present an alternative. Otherwise, it really will look like the party is just moaning about the world: you can’t look like an alternative government if you don’t have alternative policies. And if they can bite the bullet on wealth taxes for social care – in whatever form here – it can force open the argument about wealth and taxation more generally: a must if the party is to go into the next election with something approaching a serious, long-term programme to solve Britain’s chronic economic problems. And wealth taxes, as the polling evidence keeps showing us, are popular. (Unsurprisingly: by definition, almost none of us are in the top 1%…)

Party Conference

Labour Party Conference, returning to Brighton at the end of the month after a two-year covid-induced pause, will be the biggest opportunity the party and its new leadership has had to date to present its case. You don’t often get a free hit at the following day’s front page headlines as the Opposition, but that’s what Conference can offer, Keir Starmer has offered some rather broad hints about his own speech, and of course it’s the leader’s closing address that gets the bulk of the media attention. But Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ own speech is going to be worth keeping an eye on. She has already marked out a few key commitments, including a strikingly anti-neoliberal Mariana Mazzucato-style policy to support domestic supply chains and jobs. This was particularly noteworthy: the first time that I can recall Labour offering a genuinely post-Brexit policy under Starmer’s leadership. Now that we have left the EU, there is a seam there to be mined – with a bit of policy imagination.

But the challenge for Reeves and her team in three weeks’ time will be to not only throw in some headline-grabbing policy announcements – essential for the front pages – but to start to create a convincing story about what sort of economy the next Labour government wants to shape. Credibility doesn’t come from parroting the economically illiterate nonsense that clutters Westminster political reporting; it’ll come from having a clear, simple story that potentially millions of people can grasp and understand. The Tories’ NICs hike has given Labour a free gift, the chance to show they are the party that will look after your pay packet. Tax the wealthy, not the workers has a certain ring to it.

The post Social care and the Tories’ raid on paypackets appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

Robert Skidelsky

Will Hutton

The post The Return of the State – Council members explain the purpose of the book appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

Edited by PEF Chair Patrick Allen and council members Suzanne Konzelmann and Jan Toporowski

Publication Date 29th April 2021. Agenda Publishing

40 years of neoliberalism has failed to provide prosperity or stability to the UK economy. Instead it has led to low growth, turbulence, grotesque inequality , poverty and ill health for millions . This is the outcome of damaging economic polices driven by free market dogma, rentier capitalism and ideology. It’s time for a change.

This book contains 18 essays by PEF council members and academics who outline the essential features of a progressive economy dealing with the five massive challenges of our times to the economy – Covid-19, austerity, Brexit , inequality and climate change.

PEF calls for bold public intervention. Shrinking the state and weakening our public institutions has undermined social and community resilience and promoted an out-of-control, value-sapping and high-inequality model of capitalism. 

The authors say the resources of the state must build a fairer and more dynamic post-Covid society, using a mix of regional and industrial policy and investment to revolutionise our public health, housing and social services. A progressive new society should construct a new income floor and new measures to spread wealth and give everyone an equal stake in the economy. 

The financial crash of 2008 proved that only the state can rescue the economy when all else fails including the biggest banks. Covid has shown how only the state can rescue us from death and the collapse of the economy during a devastating pandemic. Only the state can steer the economy and deliver the investment needed to cope with climate change

The 2008 crash showed the breathtaking incompetence of the private financial sector. Now Covid has once again laid bare the myth than private is best – outsourcing to companies the job of track and trace at a cost of £37bn has so far failed to show any discernible benefit say the Public Accounts Committee.

By contrast, the selfless work of millions of NHS workers and volunteers has delivered one of the most outstanding vaccination programmes which has been the envy of the world. This has been done at modest cost and was only possible with a national health service drawing on the vocational drive of its workers for the common good.

The Biden adminstration is today showing the mighty power of the US State with Biden’s Covid and infrastructure bills. The results are expected to cut child poverty in half. The UK government should follow this lead and bring in new models of public intervention to deliver a pandemic-resistant, green economy which works for all citizens.

For an outline , list of chapters and authors and to order a copy go to this webpage

You can obtain a 25% discount on the cover price by entering code AGENDA25 on the Agenda page here

Launch event on Zoom – Wednesday 19th May 2021 at 11am . Joining details to follow.

The launch will be chaired Miatta Fahnbulleh , CEO of NEF and attended by Ed Miliband, Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy . Martin Sandbu of the FT will attend as commentator.

The post PEF publishes blue print for the post-covid economy on 29th April 2021 appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.