How to deal with the end of life as we know it – take out a magazine subscription?

 dependency, economic abuse, economic blackmail, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, in a hole, marketing-speak, publishing  No Responses »
Jan 022013
 

This came my way a few minutes ago:

RT @_Lilykins The irony of Osborne claiming Labour is the party of borrowing, when he’s borrowing at record levels.

As a result, I tweeted the following:

Much better to be the party of borrowing than the party of daylight robbery. At least when you borrow, you aim to give s’thing back.

And then, quite felicitously and via Rick’s always perspicacious eye, came this story from Money Week titled portentously “The End of Britain”.  Apparently we’re stuffed – and not just Christmas-turkey stuffed either.  Roundly, totally and utterly stuffed. Stuffed till the end of time.

The end, in fact, of life as we know it.

Time to buy up supermarkets of tinned foods various?  Time to bunker down in outrageously expensive survivalist holes?

This is clearly Douglas Adams territory.

Clearly is, my friends.

For the solution that Money Week provides for its horrified readers to this veritable apocalypse of barely conceivable and almost indescribable proportions is none other than … wait for it … [innocent drum roll multiplied a thousandfold] … a magazine subscription to its content!

Yay!  Salvation was never so cheap!

A perfect end to a perfectly constructed universe.

The consumer and welfare societies, brought down by their two-headed dependency mindsets.  And yet, now, so dramatically saved at one easy stroke by a simple subscription to a possessor of secret truths like these.

Now where have I heard that before?

<sighs>

Will we never learn?

*

As to whether the oracle, above-mentioned, is right or wrong, I have no professional framework which allows me to provide you with an answer either way.  But what does seem clear is that if what they say ends up taking place, a magazine subscription will be a woeful defence against the societal trauma the publication appears to be predicting.

And if, indeed, as some have suggested, the content is the wizard wheeze of some overblown marketing department, surely it’s time that Money Week did a little bit of fruitful navel-gazing – and analysed its behaviours in terms of the apocalypse it apparently expects.  Printing stuff like this with the mere intention and objective of increasing the take-up of membership subs is hardly the most gratifying spectacle we might witness.

And whether one would choose to be a harbinger of doom or not, there are better ways of making one’s way in the world than this.

I’m no economist, but …

 Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition economics, dumbing down, economic blackmail, economic democracy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, Ed Miliband, Labour, process, unclassifiable  3 Responses »
Sep 142012
 

This news, clearly part of a broadening government attack on workforces’ rights, is just the start, isn’t it?  Beginning to move the goalposts, so that in law unfair dismissal is no longer unfair, is only part of a wider process designed to shift the blame for economic injustice and inefficient process from the so-called wealth creators to the workers themselves.

In truth, if these wealth creators were really so very good at their jobs, they wouldn’t resort to the simplistic notions of firing workers to get out of economic holes they’d gone and dug for themselves. After all, the easiest thing when parachuting into a company with problems is to order a three-month review and fire ten percent of the people.  Far more difficult, far more value-adding, far more deserving of the high salaries these supposedly clever people are able to command, is to analyse all the processes which operate in the company and rework them little by little so everyone employed has a value-adding role.

It’s much easier, however, to shift the blame for inefficient economies onto surplus workers who are surplus through no fault of their own.  And since it’s much easier, government and business lobbyists both look for intellectual cloaks to justify their poor and shabby instincts.

We, as workers, deserve far better strategies.  They, as supposed wealth creators, have none.

For in reality, in any case, these wealth creators seem of late mainly to be putting their wealth into non-manufacturing and low-employment sectors – where the financial returns for their own private money piles are going to be much higher.  As an example, I remember reading a short while ago about how major car companies now make more money out of financial services and investments than they do out of making cars.  I wonder how much employment such decisions now generate.  I wonder how many workers, as a result, aren’t even contracted in the first place.

The worst of it all, of course, is that in an economy where consumer confidence is low – and demand is just about as shaky as it could get – we’re getting business leaders looking to make their shrinking markets less unprofitable by cheapening the cost of hiring and firing labour.  So where is the entrepreneurial ambition in that?  What’s more, where is the economic common sense?  You’re hardly going to get demand up on its feet if you make workforces, consumers and families in general feel even less confident about their futures.  And yet cheapening the cost of hiring and firing labour is exactly what that will achieve.

One final thought.  The Labour Party is investing much of its energy in the idea of predistribution.  One element of this concept, if I have rightly understood it, is that we should believe in and aim for high-quality and high-skill economies.  My experience of working in a large banking corporation would, however, indicate this is not the way forwards that at the very least big business is looking for.  In giant organisations, they always look to dumb down competencies, for several reasons:

  1. Reduce the impact of staff turnover.
  2. Reduce the cost of retraining.
  3. Reduce the cost of salaries.
  4. Reduce the danger of intellectual property loss.

These are all key elements in the decision to choose the dumbing-down of processes over the training-up of staff.  In reality, high-quality and high-skill economies can only operate in those societies where there are extremely high levels of trust and stability between workers and management.  This is definitely not the case in Coalition Britain.

And if Ed Miliband’s right-wingers continue to encourage him to sit on his hands, as they probably will do, it’s hardly going to improve under any future Labour government.

Does a democratic morality now have a place in economic theory?

 a con, economic democracy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, experts  No Responses »
Jun 072012
 

Back in December, I wrote an unhappy piece on the subject of blaming professionals – in particular, lawyers, bankers and economists – for a whole host of miseries that are currently afflicting us.  I concluded thus:

Though there is, of course, an alternative to making diabolic the entire financial services sector: hate the lawyer as suggested; envy the banker just in case; and commiserate with the poor economist for the impossible task he or she has always faced.

Suzanne Moore, writing yesterday in the Guardian, concludes with no such kindness.  Instead, she says (the bold is mine):

Do not complain either when economists and government ministers tell you that what you thought had a social purpose must now be profit-driven. Money must be made from schools, hospitals and looking after the elderly. The privatisation of care is one of the only growth industries. This is what you get from this dictatorship of economists, and it should be overthrown. It is wrong and keeps being wrong. The choices to be made now are moral, not economic ones. Only an idiot or an economist would think otherwise.

Which brings me to wonder if we couldn’t conflate the two concepts: no, not idiocy and economics; that – as an idea – is surely the laziness of Moore’s (and, on occasions, my) writing.  No, what I’m really wondering is whether there isn’t a place in economic theory for the matter of morality – in particular a democratic morality.

At the very least there currently exists an amorality of considerable proportions.  (Some of us on the left of the political spectrum would even see it as immorality – though, for the sake of today’s discussion, let’s settle on the former as a less inflammatory and distracting starting point.)

What’s the argument I have in mind?  Nobody these days would expect of a “proper” science a total disconnect from moral issues.  If then, as Moore alleges in her piece, and even as she charges it fails, economics aspires to such a state of scientific grace, shouldn’t it also be required to take onboard issues relating to societal right and wrong?

The problem would currently seem to be that in its socially scientific ingenuity, economics manages to get away with getting things amazingly inexact.  Like the weather forecasts we expect not to believe, economists have the grand virtue of working with complex systems with many variables to justify their getting predictions off-beam.  This may, in fact, be what’s at the heart of Moore’s little rant.  Yet we wouldn’t ask the Met Office to stop its investigations into such complexities; why, then, does she want economists to step off the accelerator pedal?

Maybe the reason is precisely that: we have learned – and have the capacity as ordinary citizens in the street – to ignore the implications of an inexact weather forecast whenever we want.  But that level of democratic disengagement doesn’t seem to exist in the application of economic theory.

Today, for example, I read that according to the rating agency Fitch, which presumably employs a number of economists to validate its periodic pronouncements, the Spanish banking system won’t need €40 billion to sort it out as originally believed but, instead, between €60 to a €100 billion (in Spanish) (Google robot English translation here).  Just imagine if we ran any other expensively rewarded profession in a similar way: being paid to get things wrong by such enormous factors.

Meanwhile – to a non-expert – another question arises: how did the banks themselves get it so wrong?

After all, money’s their business surely.  More than any of us, they should have known how far to go in getting into debt and marshalling the consequential risk.

So did an absence of the morality Moore requests of society play a part in the disasters they are now bringing to the table?  Would things have turned out differently if a democratic morality had had a place in economic theory?  And how long can economists continue to exert their profession without factoring in the social pain their experiments are apparently leading to?

Of course, Suzanne Moore is unfair in her criticism of economists – just as I was unfair back in December when I foulmouthed not only the latter but also bankers and lawyers.  Those of us who find ourselves at the mercy of forces beyond our ken are bound, at some time, to make the mistake of shooting the messengers.

Or mistaking the messengers for the actors themselves.

But whilst economists refuse to integrate into their assumptions their effects on finite human lives, perhaps – after all – it’s not such a massive mistake.

Not because they are idiots, though, as Moore would have us believe; rather, because they are just too undemocratically amoral for them to acquire the right to be the scientists they wish to emulate.

Economics simply hasn’t caught up with the moral progresses and societal engagements of the hard sciences.

It’s time it did.

Why we’re in the shit we’re in

 a con, Coalition capitalism, David Cameron, economic abuse, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, elitism, politicians, politics  No Responses »
May 202012
 

Apologies for the title.  But reading this article from the Wall Street Journal this morning reveals to me with an evermore greater clarity exactly why we’re in the shit we’re in.  Some choice thoughts from this excellent piece on the subject of what economists really (don’t) know:

As Greece girds for elections next month that could lead to its exit from the euro zone, economists are acknowledging an unsettling reality: No one knows what the bill will be.

[...]

The Institute of International Finance, a global association of banks that has represented private lenders to Greece in negotiations with the country, took a broader view. In a February report that leaked in March, it put the total cost at a minimum of €1 trillion, including over €700 billion that could be needed to prop up other troubled European economies, including Portugal and Italy.

[...]

“The IIF went for a trillion because, why not?” says Gary Jenkins, founder of Swordfish Research, a U.K. bond-analysis firm. “It’s a great figure, sounds fantastic.” However, Mr. Jenkins adds, “I don’t think anyone can work out a precise figure. The uncertainties are just absolutely huge.”

So whilst Mr Cameron’s government berates us for not putting our household affairs in order, his chummy friends at stratospheric economic levels go for a back-of-the-envelope figure when pricing the cost of things – because it “sounds fantastic”.  And in the meantime, such back-of-the-envelope merchants continue to describe the less-advantaged economic powerhouses of the West as PIGS.

Fuck youse.

*

Question is, who are those “youse”?

Economists will argue that as theoreticians and thinkers, they simply lay before those who take the decisions the options they’ve duly imagined.

On the other hand, those who participated in developing the atom bomb surely had qualms of conscience around the matter – even if they took no part in the final decision to drop it.

So do we blame the economists for creating a self-consuming Darwinian evil of winner takes all?  Or do we blame the politicians for eagerly attaching themselves to such theories when the intellectual times we live in could’ve delivered so much more?

Or can we simply rejoice – in a cutting-one’s-nose-off kind of way – that even the experts must now experience the directionless impotence the rest of us are living from day-to-bloody-day?

“Austerity” is a euphemism; a “collateral damage” for our times

 a con, atomised society, economic blackmail, economic chemotherapy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, people, perishable goods, politicians, politics, professional politicos  No Responses »
May 072012
 

I just tweeted the following thought:

“Austerity” is a neat euphemism – just like “collateral damage”: those who use it refuse to take ownership for the pain they cause.

A definition of “collateral damage” then?  This is what Wikipedia currently says on the matter:

Collateral damage occurs when something incidental to the intended target is damaged during an attack. When used in conjunction with military operations it can refer to the incidental destruction of civilian property and non-combatant casualties.[1][2]

Whilst some time back we might have thought the intended target of austerity strategies everywhere was supposedly lazy and complacent economic processes – foolish lending by lenders on the one hand, excessive borrowing by borrowers on the other – it would now appear that the real object of austerity measures has become the people themselves.  Essentially because those in power now care to shift the blame for their manifest stupidities onto those who occupy the lower levels of societal hierarchy:

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said that banks were not solely responsible for the financial crisis as “they had to lend to someone”.

The minister, who played a key role in drawing up David Cameron’s economic strategy in opposition, also claimed that people who took out loans were “consenting adults” who, in some cases, were now be seeking to blame others for their actions.

And this:

“Households were spending more than they earned. That’s why household debt rose.”

It’s clear, then, that up there in the stratosphere of decision-makers, there must be a more widely shared perception that voters and their families and friends – not systemic failure of complex financial instruments – are now in the cross-hairs of those who make policy.

Mr Hammond is hardly going to have invented the idea in a vacuum, after all.

It is my thesis, therefore, that austerity measures as engineered and devised of late do not aim to sort out a dysfunctional economy first and foremost – only collaterally damaging and hurting the people who depend on its workings.  No.  In reality, these people in charge are looking precisely to damage and hurt the people first and foremost, for it is they who are to blame for not having operated as economies most need.

Whilst before we wondered if the people had become a necessary, even if sad, collateral damage to an attempt to rescue an economy, it seems clear to me now – and perhaps to you too – that the economy has become a necessary, even if sad, collateral damage to a pontificating and patronising attempt from top-flight politicos to allegedly rescue the people from themselves.

We the people are being punished because we do not act as these politicos and economists various believe economies need us to act: sensibly, rationally, intelligently and measuredly.

Because we cannot manage that, they – even they – are prepared to sacrifice their own love of that beast which is the economy (their whole reason for being, acting and researching) on the altar of societal suicide.

Rather than contemplate making economic theory in the image of the people’s needs, they prefer to prejudice the perishable goods that are people’s finite lives.

In this, both politicians and economists are the trench-warfare generals of our time.

Where, if not at the beginning of the 20th century, are we to find such an example of stubborn idiocy and casual cruelty as we now bear witness to in economic theory and practice – and throughout the world that serves to destroy us?

People in charge who refuse to take ownership for the pain and destruction they administer.

A passive-aggressive state if there ever was one.

The passive-aggressive invisible hand which wife-beats us all into submission

 Depression, economic abuse, economic blackmail, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, perishable goods, recession, suicide in Europe, unclassifiable, unemployment  No Responses »
Apr 302012
 

Two articles which tell the same story.  First, how the number of entrepreneurial, business and job-related suicides has reached alarming proportions in Italy:

According to the EURES social research institute, suicides have been on the rise in Italy since 2008, with at least two per day on average in 2010, when 362 unemployed people and 336 entrepreneurs killed themselves. In 2011, a record 11,615 Italian businesses closed their doors. In 2012, at least 25 and as many as 70 suicides have so far been linked to Italy’s economic troubles, especially prevalent in the industrial north and the construction industry.

The widows say there is too little dialogue and not enough state support for families that have fallen into despair over unemployment, bankruptcies and loan defaults.

Second, a story from Britain on how the very body politic that is responsible for administering our terrible response to the awful crises that assail us responds most despondently – and with equally dispiriting familial implications – to its ongoing consequences.

Essentially what we have is a situation where people must fit into systems.  No one believes, these days, that we should fashion our economies around the needs of the finite and perishable goods that are real people’s lives.  The reality is that whilst the systems seem to be working, most people are happy to muddle along – and even allow the powerful to encourage such muddling.

But since we are so locked into our systems, when the latter break down … well, so do we.

I am reminded of this by the story reported from Spain recently where the cost of Metro journeys was I believe hiked by 30 percent.  Just imagine the effect on an ordinary commuter.  In a sense, when they bought their flat on the outskirts of town, a social contract was being signed by the providers of such infrastructures and the purchasers: you settle down here, bring your income and your outgoings, and we’ll provide the reasonable means for you to get to work.

Now the message is: we’ve got you by the balls.  Stuff your standard of living.  Stump up the difference.

And it’d probably be morally justifiable if we were all equally affected, too.  But we’re not.

This is not just capitalism.

This is naked and unbridled theft.

And whilst the economic experts talk of the dangers of economic recession, the real danger out there is a marauding and eventually all-encompassing depression of an emotional nature.

An emotional depression in which the passive-aggressive economies that nudge us so very cleverly have, step by deadening step, ensnared us.  Just as that wife-beater makes his wife believe through very reasonable argument that she is the real problem at heart, so these economies – and their public sponsors and representatives – are designed and structured to make us all feel we are to blame for the disasters which are destroying so many existences.

Never was the invisible hand better named.  The invisible hand not that guides the markets but wife-beats the voters, their families, colleagues and friends into savage and terrible submission.

Idealism as the realm of politics (or what we’ve all gone and lost)

 economic democracy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, ideas, ideology, on a high, politicians, politicking, politics, undemocracy, uneconomics  No Responses »
Mar 222012
 

Frances Coppola – she of ex-bankers fame – makes a lovely point in relation to how politics and economics should approach each other:

@peterpannier I think idealism is properly the realm of politics. Work to change the ethical stance of policy, and economics will follow

Here I do feel we see a mindset which comes from massive corporate organisation: for anything to work, there needs to be a very specific and particular set of shared values.  Get the ethical stance right – which the vast majority of corporations in a competitive rather than collaborative world only ever manage to pay HR lip service to – and the rest will sort itself out.

I think she’s right, of course.  Which is why revolving doors (more here) are so particularly damaging.  They strip away all opportunity for ethical stances as deliberately entailed conflicts of interest sweep away all moral behaviours.

And I don’t mean moral as in morality itself: just what’s proper and fit when you take on the responsibility of representing others.  If in loco parentis means we can trust our teachers to do as we would do, in loco voteris – as a concept and philosophy (don’t hold me to the Latin, mind!) – would encourage our representatives to see us as their clients and customers and therefore, with the appropriate sensitivity, act accordingly.

Idealism as the realm of politics?  Yes.  That’s what’s missing in modern politicking.  The lines between politics and socioeconomic theory have become so blurred that the ability to dream a better world is lost to current society.  We have become so terribly unambitious in what we imagine for ourselves that what we do is now reduced to administering rank inequality.

We need dreamers again to predict the future.  Not nightmares which force us only to survive in the present.

____________________

Further reading: James Firth has just brought this excellent post of his to my attention on the subject of societal trust and confidence and their relationships to a wider prosperity.  Well worth your time.

Who should we hate the most – lawyers, bankers or economists?

 bankers, economists, Jack of Kent, lawyers, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Dec 302011
 

Jack of Kent has a revealing piece about why it’s socially acceptable to hate lawyers.  This, in particular, lays bare the whys and wherefores of this prejudice:

The reason why lawyers are generally disliked may not be down to their actual conduct or their personal qualities.

It is instead because law is both powerful and – in the main – invisible.

Law leaves traces in certain documents and speech acts, and it can manifest itself in the coercive actions of hard-faced individuals; but generally law is equally threatening and elusive.

It is perhaps not so much that lawyers are hated, but that law itself is feared and mysterious.

I think, in the main, from my limited contact with the profession, an essential element of our shared inability to like lawyers lies in the fact that lawyers tend to be right.

Even when they are found wrong, in some court case or another, everything is apparently a question of debate – and might easily have turned out quite differently.

When we pay lawyers, we pay them to interpret law – and in that interpretation they have a get-out clause which covers all eventualities.

Thus it is that we hate lawyers because – inevitably – they are always right.

Even when, from the client’s emotional standpoint, they end up being incomprehensibly wrong.

*

And so it is I then ask myself the question at the top of this post: who should we hate the most – lawyers, bankers or economists?

For I do wonder whether the current salvoes broadly directed towards the banking fraternity are – at the same time – misdirected out of ignorance.  In reality, who is to blame for the economic misery ordinary people are being exposed to?  Bankers were – and are – almost certainly simple pawns in a wider systemic set of failings they chose to discretely operate within: so yes, to an extent they were to blame; but no, to a degree they were hardly capable of seeing beyond the careful Chinese walls that all corporate agents are inevitably surrounded by.

Surely we should really blame the artifices themselves of the systems that failed – and not the perhaps relatively helpless and rather more visible frontline protagonists.  That is to say, instead of looking to fault the bankers simply out to make a quick buck, our ire should really have focussed on the economists who devised the technical and ideological infrastructures which stumbled and trembled us to essential long-term oblivion – as all the time they encouraged the economic players to employ their very basest and most disagreeable instincts.

To recapitulate, then: if we hate lawyers because their professional structures mean they are always going to be right, even when they are wrong; and if we currently despise bankers because – in truth – it is easy to understand the idea of modern money-grabbing Scrooges who act out of a cold-hearted self-interest … shouldn’t we also contemplate lining up against the revolutionary wall the economists who have so heavy-handedly failed us?  For in their light-touch regulatory instincts, in their inability to agree productively in public, in their tendency to distort a social science with the tainting instincts of ideological coat-hangers, in their massive desire to test out their theories on real human beings and use the poverty of the 99 percent as a laboratory for personal glory … in all of the above – and much much more I am sure – there is plenty to find at the very least resistible in the profession of the economist.

And yet, curiously, it would seem, they have escaped relatively unscathed the storms and travails of recent times.

Perhaps they are, in fact, for most of us on the planet, quite the opposite of lawyers as described above: where we hate lawyers for always being right, even when we feel they are all very very wrong, the very fact that no economist can ever agree with another surely leads us to conclude that it would be quite unjust to find fault with such an uneven profession.

Perhaps, in truth, as we pity ourselves – and our own medium-term futures under a system which has so manifestly failed to deliver – we can only find it in ourselves to summon up a sadness that a science so central to so much of what we do these days has proved itself so selfish in how it has cared to practise its wisdoms.

What is there to hate in something so imprecise?  Much easier to see the Devil and all His works in the pawns which do the dirty work that such systems allow.

Though there is, of course, an alternative to making diabolic the entire financial services sector: hate the lawyer as suggested; envy the banker just in case; and commiserate with the poor economist for the impossible task he or she has always faced.