Given his origins in St Petersburg which, as Leningrad, had been downgraded and largely left to rot under the Soviet regime; plus his subsequent career in the KGB, I am continually astonished how ably President Vladimir Putin is coping with the massive range of issues and responsibilities that fall on his shoulders.
He succeeded the drunken shell of the once-outstanding Boris Yeltsin, under whose presidency of Russia - just one of the successor states to the collapsed Soviet Union - the crumbling economy had been despoiled and brought to the brink of ruin. Crass and corrupt 'privatisation' [which had supposedly been intended to hand out shares in all major assets to the mass of the people] had enabled the most competent of the former 'fixers' to acquire control of massive corporations and rightly earn the description as 'oligarchs' and as a 'mafia'. Under the Soviet regime, especially when strict Stalinist controls and planning targets were relaxed, the economy was only able to function by factory managers and farm directors operating a massive black market in which clothing and shoes were bartered for industrial output and food, so that the towns' workers could be fed and the oppressed involuntary farmhands shod; while the factories and farms turned in less than their planned output to the official channels of distribution. This huge trade was managed by risk-takers who were occasionally arrested when one of them failed to bribe the local party officials sufficiently, or when some illicit trade became so much of a public scandal in the region where it was perpetrated that action simply had to be taken to restore some credibility to the regime.
The spread of television gave millions of people more awareness of how low the standard of living for hard-working Soviet subjects had become, in comparison to western Europe and the USA. The diffusion of access to telephones allowed millions of people - especially in western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, the Baltic Republics [which had slightly better access to knowledge of Scandinavia] and the European satellite states - to begin personal bartering to raise their own standard of living. Swapping knowledge, access to better schools and hospitals, and admission to the queue for buying cars, electrical goods, western records and properly-made jeans. This development of trade went on through the stagnant years of Brezhnev's presidency, and reached such proportions in the early years of Gorbachev's rule that his government took strenuous measures to drive this illicit trade further underground so that the government's plans to develop a real consumer economy might have some chance of success. With the collapse of Gorbachev's regime and into the chaos of the Yeltsin's years, it was only the illicit swap economy that kept most households going. as the formal economy collapsed.
Putin's achievement has been to create something very broadly like a market economy in less than twenty years. This accomplishment has been unprecedented: and it is recognised by the genuine 80%-plus approval rate that the president has received from the Russian population. The many faults of the regime, the corruption and the acts of oppression that are far too common, are well reported in the west. Those are is important aspects of life in modern Russia, which in an ideal world would quickly be rectified: but priorities have to be set, and a broad consensus of the population accepts the sequence that has been adopted.
Tuesday, 7 November 2017
Monday, 6 November 2017
Russia's Revolutions
BBC Radio three is presenting a series of programmes of Russian and Soviet-era music in commemoration of the centenary of what they call 'the Russian revolution': and the presenters have called the series "Breaking Free". Who exactly these denizens of the BBC reckon became 'free' as a result of the second - the Bolshevik, or Soviet - Revolution is not clear. By the mid-twenties, after the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin to almost-complete power, composers, playwrights, and artists had to become careful about their output. As Stalin and his significant army of associates consolidated their hold over the new order, with the purges of the 'thirties and the 'forties, musicians and other cultural figures - who were allowed to be named in the media - were persecuted by imprisonment and worse [assignment to slave labour camps and the constant risk of 'administrative' death sentences] if they exposed themselves to the suspicion that they might have dissented from actions by the party and its current leaders.
Only the party leaders, the commentators who praised them and the artistic community were named in the media and thus known to the mass of the populace. Therefore any deviation from the sort of 'socialist realism' that Stalin approved was likely to result in the victimisation of a perpetrator who was one of the nomenklatura. Stalin considered himself an aficionado of music and ballet, enjoyed theatre [when he approved of the content of the play] and was a voracious reader, making a massive number of marginal comments in his books: both fiction and non-fiction: so no writer or performer could escape his critical oversight. He also followed Lenin in being a massively prolific writer. In speeches several hours long, in newspaper articles [often written anonymously] and in longer texts Stalin set out the party line. There is no doubt that Stalin worked hard, often far into the night: after which he was often ready to booze until dawn with the changing cohort of his intimates. Over the decades the tenor of his output changed, according to circumstances and to the writer's changing moods; therefore the literate classes had to review continuously what they kept openly on their bookshelves, hiding away [preferably, destroying] editions and items which expressed views that were no longer acknowledged by their originator.
Stalin himself was not 'free'. He had to lug his impedimenta of Marxist-Leninist dogma - as reinterpreted on an almost-daily basis by himself - everywhere he went, because he saw that as his legitimating authority. Provided he wrapped up everything that he said and wrote in party-speak, he felt that his utterances were authoritative. An added difficulty with this arose from the fact that he was not a native Russian speaker, and apparently some aspects of sentence construction always eluded him when setting out his stall in the prevailing language. Thus his followers sometimes had to develop their own exposition of what they assumed he had said, in handing down the message to the underfed, tired cohorts of heroic proletarians whom they sought to urge on to ever-greater efforts in the cause of 'socialist construction'.
By the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Imperial Russia was already the world's ninth-greatest industrial producer, and the fourth-biggest economy in the world [by estimated turnover, or GNP]. During the war massive investments were made in mines, steelworks and industrial plant in the Ural mountains, well away from the old industrial areas of Russian-ruled Poland and the Ukraine which were dangerously close to the front. There was a constant danger during the war that the Germans and/or the Austrians would be able to capture the long-established heavy industry around St Petersburg and in the western provinces. So the Tsarist regime promoted massive development of industry in the east, much of which Stalin was later to claim had been built on virgin territory under the succession of five-year plans by which the Stalin regime claimed to be 'transforming' the USSR. It is unclear how much of the 'new industry' that turned out the tanks and the guns for the Red Army after the Nazi invasion of 1941 was actually new under Stalin, and how much came from the Tsarist war economy: and at this distance in time the resources of economic historians may never be sufficient to find out.
This blog can only scratch - very slightly - at the surface of the massive issues that are disclosed as soon as the Russian Revolutions of 1917 is to be studied. In the coming days I intend to look as just a few aspects of economy and society in an era that should have been exciting, but which was made massively more oppressive and depressing than the society and the regime that had existed before the first revolution.
Only the party leaders, the commentators who praised them and the artistic community were named in the media and thus known to the mass of the populace. Therefore any deviation from the sort of 'socialist realism' that Stalin approved was likely to result in the victimisation of a perpetrator who was one of the nomenklatura. Stalin considered himself an aficionado of music and ballet, enjoyed theatre [when he approved of the content of the play] and was a voracious reader, making a massive number of marginal comments in his books: both fiction and non-fiction: so no writer or performer could escape his critical oversight. He also followed Lenin in being a massively prolific writer. In speeches several hours long, in newspaper articles [often written anonymously] and in longer texts Stalin set out the party line. There is no doubt that Stalin worked hard, often far into the night: after which he was often ready to booze until dawn with the changing cohort of his intimates. Over the decades the tenor of his output changed, according to circumstances and to the writer's changing moods; therefore the literate classes had to review continuously what they kept openly on their bookshelves, hiding away [preferably, destroying] editions and items which expressed views that were no longer acknowledged by their originator.
Stalin himself was not 'free'. He had to lug his impedimenta of Marxist-Leninist dogma - as reinterpreted on an almost-daily basis by himself - everywhere he went, because he saw that as his legitimating authority. Provided he wrapped up everything that he said and wrote in party-speak, he felt that his utterances were authoritative. An added difficulty with this arose from the fact that he was not a native Russian speaker, and apparently some aspects of sentence construction always eluded him when setting out his stall in the prevailing language. Thus his followers sometimes had to develop their own exposition of what they assumed he had said, in handing down the message to the underfed, tired cohorts of heroic proletarians whom they sought to urge on to ever-greater efforts in the cause of 'socialist construction'.
By the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Imperial Russia was already the world's ninth-greatest industrial producer, and the fourth-biggest economy in the world [by estimated turnover, or GNP]. During the war massive investments were made in mines, steelworks and industrial plant in the Ural mountains, well away from the old industrial areas of Russian-ruled Poland and the Ukraine which were dangerously close to the front. There was a constant danger during the war that the Germans and/or the Austrians would be able to capture the long-established heavy industry around St Petersburg and in the western provinces. So the Tsarist regime promoted massive development of industry in the east, much of which Stalin was later to claim had been built on virgin territory under the succession of five-year plans by which the Stalin regime claimed to be 'transforming' the USSR. It is unclear how much of the 'new industry' that turned out the tanks and the guns for the Red Army after the Nazi invasion of 1941 was actually new under Stalin, and how much came from the Tsarist war economy: and at this distance in time the resources of economic historians may never be sufficient to find out.
This blog can only scratch - very slightly - at the surface of the massive issues that are disclosed as soon as the Russian Revolutions of 1917 is to be studied. In the coming days I intend to look as just a few aspects of economy and society in an era that should have been exciting, but which was made massively more oppressive and depressing than the society and the regime that had existed before the first revolution.
Sunday, 5 November 2017
Corruption Catch-All
In the coming week I will revert to the theme of the Russian Revolutions and their consequences; but the overnight News about Saudi Arabia, combined with discussions of the current situation in China as President Trump attends the apotheosis of President Xi, raises an omnipresent global issue.
The Saudi Crown Prince has emerged in that role after an elaborate process to bring [at last] a grandson of the hugely prolific founder of the country, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, into the pole position to be the next king: the first of the next generation to have a high degree of probability of succeeding to the notionally absolutely powerful top position. From the nineteen fifties until now a succession of sons of the first king, by a succession of his wives [many of whom were sisters, cousins and other close relations of each other], have held the post; but the lastborn among them are now in extreme old age. There is probably a registrar of the dynasty who knows exactly how many princes and princesses there are, including the offspring of Ibn Saud's brothers; many of whom are intermarried with each other. The international media report their number to be some thousands as, unlike the British Royal Family, all the family members have royal titles.
The contrasting British position is that sons and daughters of monarchs are princes and princesses, but that children of princesses and children of daughters of the monarch's sons and sons of the sons of the monarch who do not stand in the direct line of succession are not princes or princesses. Thus the children of Princess Anne, and of the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent [sons of sons of George V] are not princes or princesses. This keeps the 'inner' or 'close' royal family manageably small.
The contrasting situation in Saudi Arabia means that these thousands of royal persons expect high status and high incomes; which were affordable when the family was smaller, the oil price was higher and the monarchy was able to use its position as the 'swing producer' in OPEC to enforce the price control system that they established in 1973. With ever-more royalty and shrinking oil prices as Russia increases its influence as an oil producer and fracking develops in the USA, the Saudi model of the past century is redundant. The new Crown Prince has spent the last two years securing his position among this thousands of cousins, and is now making moves to modernise the system. There are bound to be winners and losers from such a revolution, and alliances have been formed that may or may not prove strong enough for the Crown Prince to consolidate his position for a reign of up to half a century. He has now made the big move: the arrest of dozens of individuals [including several royalty] some of whom have been ministers in the government: all of them charged with corruption.
In a system like the Saudi, where the term Byzantine denotes a situation insufficiently arcane to explain the regime in operation, almost anybody - high or lowly in terms of hierarchy - can be charged with what a German or a Belgian would recognise to be corrupt practice. Charges of corruption will be upheld against many [if not all] of the arrested parties; and the purge can go on indefinitely, as in the Stalin era in the USSR where ever-wider definitions of crimes against the state can be used simply to keep all the survivors in a state of abject subordination to the dominant power. It will be the greatest challenge for the Crown Prince, if he succeeds i holding his position through this exercise, to stop when the purge has gone far enough.
President Xi's situation in China is similar to that which the Crown Prince clearly intends to prevail in Saudi Arabia. In his first five-year term as head of the party and head of state Xi has ensured that nobody stands to challenge him during the coming five years in a way that could ensure that he is forced to stand down after his second quinquennium. China's rise to wealth has been faster and much more broadly-based than in the case of Saudi Arabia. The control of the country by the party has meant that the power-brokers in every region have been able to grant and deny licenses and permissions for every kind of activity; thus successful individuals in the buccaneering capitalism that has emerged have necessarily squared themselves with the power structure. Some people in power have held to the standards of Confucian and Leninist integrity that have been expected of them: some have not. Some can have cases manufactured against them, in what is ultimately a dictatorship: some guilty people can be so useful to the top men that their crimes can - pro tem , at least - be ignored.
Precisely the same sorts of process are happening in China and Saudi: the consolidation of the power of the dictator is secured - and gains at least a good measure of popular support - by bringing guilty exploiters of public office to account. Simple!
The Saudi Crown Prince has emerged in that role after an elaborate process to bring [at last] a grandson of the hugely prolific founder of the country, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, into the pole position to be the next king: the first of the next generation to have a high degree of probability of succeeding to the notionally absolutely powerful top position. From the nineteen fifties until now a succession of sons of the first king, by a succession of his wives [many of whom were sisters, cousins and other close relations of each other], have held the post; but the lastborn among them are now in extreme old age. There is probably a registrar of the dynasty who knows exactly how many princes and princesses there are, including the offspring of Ibn Saud's brothers; many of whom are intermarried with each other. The international media report their number to be some thousands as, unlike the British Royal Family, all the family members have royal titles.
The contrasting British position is that sons and daughters of monarchs are princes and princesses, but that children of princesses and children of daughters of the monarch's sons and sons of the sons of the monarch who do not stand in the direct line of succession are not princes or princesses. Thus the children of Princess Anne, and of the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent [sons of sons of George V] are not princes or princesses. This keeps the 'inner' or 'close' royal family manageably small.
The contrasting situation in Saudi Arabia means that these thousands of royal persons expect high status and high incomes; which were affordable when the family was smaller, the oil price was higher and the monarchy was able to use its position as the 'swing producer' in OPEC to enforce the price control system that they established in 1973. With ever-more royalty and shrinking oil prices as Russia increases its influence as an oil producer and fracking develops in the USA, the Saudi model of the past century is redundant. The new Crown Prince has spent the last two years securing his position among this thousands of cousins, and is now making moves to modernise the system. There are bound to be winners and losers from such a revolution, and alliances have been formed that may or may not prove strong enough for the Crown Prince to consolidate his position for a reign of up to half a century. He has now made the big move: the arrest of dozens of individuals [including several royalty] some of whom have been ministers in the government: all of them charged with corruption.
In a system like the Saudi, where the term Byzantine denotes a situation insufficiently arcane to explain the regime in operation, almost anybody - high or lowly in terms of hierarchy - can be charged with what a German or a Belgian would recognise to be corrupt practice. Charges of corruption will be upheld against many [if not all] of the arrested parties; and the purge can go on indefinitely, as in the Stalin era in the USSR where ever-wider definitions of crimes against the state can be used simply to keep all the survivors in a state of abject subordination to the dominant power. It will be the greatest challenge for the Crown Prince, if he succeeds i holding his position through this exercise, to stop when the purge has gone far enough.
President Xi's situation in China is similar to that which the Crown Prince clearly intends to prevail in Saudi Arabia. In his first five-year term as head of the party and head of state Xi has ensured that nobody stands to challenge him during the coming five years in a way that could ensure that he is forced to stand down after his second quinquennium. China's rise to wealth has been faster and much more broadly-based than in the case of Saudi Arabia. The control of the country by the party has meant that the power-brokers in every region have been able to grant and deny licenses and permissions for every kind of activity; thus successful individuals in the buccaneering capitalism that has emerged have necessarily squared themselves with the power structure. Some people in power have held to the standards of Confucian and Leninist integrity that have been expected of them: some have not. Some can have cases manufactured against them, in what is ultimately a dictatorship: some guilty people can be so useful to the top men that their crimes can - pro tem , at least - be ignored.
Precisely the same sorts of process are happening in China and Saudi: the consolidation of the power of the dictator is secured - and gains at least a good measure of popular support - by bringing guilty exploiters of public office to account. Simple!
Saturday, 4 November 2017
Revolution and Reaction in Russia
It is a fascinating aspect of human society that in the year when the two Russian Revolutions of 1917 are being remembered there is also a furious lobby of individuals who oppose the screening of a film about the life of the last Tsar before he came to the throne. In rehashing a story that has been common knowledge since the events occurred, Tsarevitch Nicholas is show in the throes of a highly-sexed relationship with a dancer from the St Petersburg opera. He was simply doing what many of the nobility did. The story has been made into a film, whose producers hope to cash in on releasing it to coincide with the centenary of the second revolution. Unluckily for the producers, since the collapse of communism the careless disposal of the imperial family's remains has been exposed, bones from most of them have been identified [with the help of DNA from the Duke of Edinburgh: a reminder that he is a very pukka royal prince] and the Orthodox church has deemed the Tsar to be a saint; if only because he died a 'martyr's death'. The consequence is that the film - though it tells [somewhat sensationally] a true story - has been condemned as blasphemous.
For me, this incident is a perfect vignette of what has happened in Russia in the past thirty years; when those decades are set against the grim background of the previous nearly-seven decades of increasingly bankrupt Marxist-Leninist dogma in conflict with the realities of twentieth-century existence.
The March Revolution saw the abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of a Provisional Government. This group of liberal-conservative democrats struggled in vain both to establish a viable political system and to continue to fight the Germans. By this third year of the First World War Russian losses where huge, the significant capacity of Russian industry and railways had been stretched too far for too long and the soldiers were fed up of fighting under incompetent command with insufficient supplies. Mutinies were commonplace, even without the added stimulus to revolution that was added by the communists. The Germans facilitated Lenin's return to Russia, the Provisional Government recognised him as a potent enemy of their nascent state, he was able to escape arrest and begin to work with Trotsky, Stalin, Molotov and others to foment his more fundamental revolution.
The Provisional Government wanted to create a genuinely democratic republic; building up from the parliamentary institutions that the Tsar had created in 2005. Lenin was out to crush capitalism [including farming by free peasants] and recognised that the destruction of democratic institutions was a necessary step towards that end. Thus he was set to overthrow the state, capture all power for his communists and for the local trades councils - the soviets - that could be manipulated and 'educated' in Leninist dogma, and establish a pseudo-state that was wholly under the control of the party. The country descended into a half-hearted civil war. The Japanese sent troops to the Russian far east, without any particular objective, and they were later recalled home. The British sent a force to Archangel in northern Russia, but they never found sufficiently organised Russian democratic forces to align with in restoring some sort of democracy and they, too, were withdrawn.
Lenin and his gang were left to make what they could of the vast Russian empire. I will carry on with this account for a few days: at least, it will be a relief from Brexit and the collapse of UK political institutions.
For me, this incident is a perfect vignette of what has happened in Russia in the past thirty years; when those decades are set against the grim background of the previous nearly-seven decades of increasingly bankrupt Marxist-Leninist dogma in conflict with the realities of twentieth-century existence.
The March Revolution saw the abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of a Provisional Government. This group of liberal-conservative democrats struggled in vain both to establish a viable political system and to continue to fight the Germans. By this third year of the First World War Russian losses where huge, the significant capacity of Russian industry and railways had been stretched too far for too long and the soldiers were fed up of fighting under incompetent command with insufficient supplies. Mutinies were commonplace, even without the added stimulus to revolution that was added by the communists. The Germans facilitated Lenin's return to Russia, the Provisional Government recognised him as a potent enemy of their nascent state, he was able to escape arrest and begin to work with Trotsky, Stalin, Molotov and others to foment his more fundamental revolution.
The Provisional Government wanted to create a genuinely democratic republic; building up from the parliamentary institutions that the Tsar had created in 2005. Lenin was out to crush capitalism [including farming by free peasants] and recognised that the destruction of democratic institutions was a necessary step towards that end. Thus he was set to overthrow the state, capture all power for his communists and for the local trades councils - the soviets - that could be manipulated and 'educated' in Leninist dogma, and establish a pseudo-state that was wholly under the control of the party. The country descended into a half-hearted civil war. The Japanese sent troops to the Russian far east, without any particular objective, and they were later recalled home. The British sent a force to Archangel in northern Russia, but they never found sufficiently organised Russian democratic forces to align with in restoring some sort of democracy and they, too, were withdrawn.
Lenin and his gang were left to make what they could of the vast Russian empire. I will carry on with this account for a few days: at least, it will be a relief from Brexit and the collapse of UK political institutions.
Friday, 3 November 2017
Some Distinguished Economists
I remember a time when the Econocracy had not yet emerged. Economics was beginning to flounder, as the NeoKeynesian orthodoxy that had been established in the nineteen fifties began to reveal its fallibility in the emergence of excess inflation in the 'sixties; which was to lead to the chaos of the 'seventies and the rise of Monetarism that paved the way for the free marketeers who were the founders of the Econocratic hegemony that currently prevails.
For any reader who might happen upon this blog, and wonder what planet I am writing from, I explain that the term Econocracy has been created by the Post Crash Economics Society, a Manchester-based student movement that has successfully challenged the prevailing orthodoxy in formal Economics that has given us the 2007-9 crash, declining living standards, decayed industry, an intractable balance of payments deficit, austerity and [in a public backlash] the Brexit calamity. The Econocrats are the professors and established lecturers, senior lecturers, readers who demand of their students credulous adherence to the dogmas that have led to the ills in society and the economy that have just been listed. The Manchester group have produced the book - Econocracy -in which they explain the term in its context. They have also published research that shows how closely most university courses follow the 'official' line.
I was fortunate to pass through a university system that was vastly smaller than it is today: fewer than forty fully-fledged UK universities, and many of them had only one professor of Economics and up to six other teachers. I find it astonishing now to look back into old university Calendars and find that whole degrees were delivered by teams as small as four academics. The Great Man of the 'Economics profession' was Sir John Hicks [the first British recipient of the pseudo-Nobel prize], but the dominant individuals who decided who got appointed to which vacant chair in Economics were Lionel Robbins [Lord Robbins of Clare Market] the unchallenged boss-man of the LSE and Charles Carter, founder VC of Lancaster University and editor-in-chief of the highly influential Economic Journal.
Typically, syllabuses contained an element of Economic History [which would greatly benefit the students of today] and also a paper on the History of Economic Thought. Mathematical aspects were not prominent, and could often be avoided: in my own university it was even possible to evade the simple Statistics course by opting for Ethics. By 1945 all universities [so far as I know] had supplanted JS Mill as the basic source text by Alfred Marshall's Economics, and they all taught about Neo-Keynesian macroeconomics. Paul A Samuelson and JK Galbraith were the best sellers among a raft of fat textbooks that combined those two syllabus areas; and when I joined the University of Sheffield as a research fellow there was a well-established game by which students tracked Prof JC Gilbert's lectures through the textbooks.
One great characteristic of the small number of leading professors of the subject was their difference in emphasis and research orientation. Bob Black at Belfast, Terence Hutcheson at Birmingham, and Ron Meek in Leicester provided a choice of interpretations that is painfully lacking today. Mark Blaug, though he went through much of his career in the shadow of Lord Robbins, was a good independent scholar. It is very sad for the subject and for the country that such a range of talent is not available today.
For any reader who might happen upon this blog, and wonder what planet I am writing from, I explain that the term Econocracy has been created by the Post Crash Economics Society, a Manchester-based student movement that has successfully challenged the prevailing orthodoxy in formal Economics that has given us the 2007-9 crash, declining living standards, decayed industry, an intractable balance of payments deficit, austerity and [in a public backlash] the Brexit calamity. The Econocrats are the professors and established lecturers, senior lecturers, readers who demand of their students credulous adherence to the dogmas that have led to the ills in society and the economy that have just been listed. The Manchester group have produced the book - Econocracy -in which they explain the term in its context. They have also published research that shows how closely most university courses follow the 'official' line.
I was fortunate to pass through a university system that was vastly smaller than it is today: fewer than forty fully-fledged UK universities, and many of them had only one professor of Economics and up to six other teachers. I find it astonishing now to look back into old university Calendars and find that whole degrees were delivered by teams as small as four academics. The Great Man of the 'Economics profession' was Sir John Hicks [the first British recipient of the pseudo-Nobel prize], but the dominant individuals who decided who got appointed to which vacant chair in Economics were Lionel Robbins [Lord Robbins of Clare Market] the unchallenged boss-man of the LSE and Charles Carter, founder VC of Lancaster University and editor-in-chief of the highly influential Economic Journal.
Typically, syllabuses contained an element of Economic History [which would greatly benefit the students of today] and also a paper on the History of Economic Thought. Mathematical aspects were not prominent, and could often be avoided: in my own university it was even possible to evade the simple Statistics course by opting for Ethics. By 1945 all universities [so far as I know] had supplanted JS Mill as the basic source text by Alfred Marshall's Economics, and they all taught about Neo-Keynesian macroeconomics. Paul A Samuelson and JK Galbraith were the best sellers among a raft of fat textbooks that combined those two syllabus areas; and when I joined the University of Sheffield as a research fellow there was a well-established game by which students tracked Prof JC Gilbert's lectures through the textbooks.
One great characteristic of the small number of leading professors of the subject was their difference in emphasis and research orientation. Bob Black at Belfast, Terence Hutcheson at Birmingham, and Ron Meek in Leicester provided a choice of interpretations that is painfully lacking today. Mark Blaug, though he went through much of his career in the shadow of Lord Robbins, was a good independent scholar. It is very sad for the subject and for the country that such a range of talent is not available today.
Thursday, 2 November 2017
Redwood - Dead Wood - Tinder - Conflagration?
I have always thought that John Redwood was better than he is generally presented by the liberal media. He has seemed - to me - more sensible than the hard core of boneheaded right-wingers who have made the prime ministerial careers of John Major and Theresa May unnecessarily difficult. There was, of course, the extreme embarrassment of him being filmed [as Secretary of State for Wales] trying to move his lower jaw in time to the Welsh National Anthem: and failing utterly. But in general I saw him as a 'trier' who was honest and not lacking in intelligence.
Then I saw a bit of his performance in the House of Commons yesterday: oh dear!
The issue was Brexit. His face was distorted with extreme, vitriolic anger. He was fed up, he declared, with the people who do this country down. The remainers and the soft Brexiteers - from his perspective - belittle this great country. Of course we can stand alone in the world, and triumph economically [with the implication that this task is trivial compared to the glorious achievement of solitary Britain in 1940-42].
It was painful and tragic to see him reduced to such a stupid and irrational argument. In descending to this lack of serious content his speech was about the best argument against his side of the issue that I have yet encountered.
The hard Brexiteers ignore the realities of the economic situation in the world. WTO Rules do not offer a safe basis on which the UK can instantly build a pattern of close trade deals with countries outside the European Economic Area, as has so often been stressed in this blog. Tariffs are not the key issue: regulations and quid-pro-quo deals that get round WTO standards dominate in world trade agreements, and the UK does not have the intellectual resources of trained manpower that would be needed to get even tentative interim deals in place by March 2019; or, indeed, by December 2021.
By declining to vote in the Commons yesterday, on the motion to publish the dossiers on 52 sectors of the economy and the potential impact on them of leaving the EEA, the Conservative Party again displayed that it has lost control of the House. It is almost certain that when these dossiers are released, they will provide a massive stock of ammunition for the remainers and will seriously undermine the sanguine daydreams of the hard Brexiteers.
The resignation on the same day of the highly-regarded Defence Secretary, on grounds that most men [and many women] of his age and origin would think to be spectacularly trivial, indicates to me that Sir Michael Fallon welcomed an excuse to get out from under the bonfire that is being built in the Tory party.
Redwood is - in political terms - dead wood, tinder dry; ready to support a conflagration that could end the two centuries of Conservatism as the dominant political organisation in the United Kingdom. The arch-Brexiteers would [apparently] force the collapse of the May government if their diabolical mission to undermine the economy is defeated. An election before Christmas has become a strong possibility; thought not yet probable.
Corbyn has always regarded the EU as a capitalist club: so he has been against it, even though Labour under his leadership notionally supported the remainers in the 2016 referendum: where millions of old-Labour voters went the other way. I doubt if the Labour leader has a clear view of what the European Economic Area is: and it is problematic whether Keir Starmer can bring him to a sensible stance on that matter. This is the one factor that could loose a December [or February] election for Labour. Politics have suddenly become much more interesting: and more frightening!
Then I saw a bit of his performance in the House of Commons yesterday: oh dear!
The issue was Brexit. His face was distorted with extreme, vitriolic anger. He was fed up, he declared, with the people who do this country down. The remainers and the soft Brexiteers - from his perspective - belittle this great country. Of course we can stand alone in the world, and triumph economically [with the implication that this task is trivial compared to the glorious achievement of solitary Britain in 1940-42].
It was painful and tragic to see him reduced to such a stupid and irrational argument. In descending to this lack of serious content his speech was about the best argument against his side of the issue that I have yet encountered.
The hard Brexiteers ignore the realities of the economic situation in the world. WTO Rules do not offer a safe basis on which the UK can instantly build a pattern of close trade deals with countries outside the European Economic Area, as has so often been stressed in this blog. Tariffs are not the key issue: regulations and quid-pro-quo deals that get round WTO standards dominate in world trade agreements, and the UK does not have the intellectual resources of trained manpower that would be needed to get even tentative interim deals in place by March 2019; or, indeed, by December 2021.
By declining to vote in the Commons yesterday, on the motion to publish the dossiers on 52 sectors of the economy and the potential impact on them of leaving the EEA, the Conservative Party again displayed that it has lost control of the House. It is almost certain that when these dossiers are released, they will provide a massive stock of ammunition for the remainers and will seriously undermine the sanguine daydreams of the hard Brexiteers.
The resignation on the same day of the highly-regarded Defence Secretary, on grounds that most men [and many women] of his age and origin would think to be spectacularly trivial, indicates to me that Sir Michael Fallon welcomed an excuse to get out from under the bonfire that is being built in the Tory party.
Redwood is - in political terms - dead wood, tinder dry; ready to support a conflagration that could end the two centuries of Conservatism as the dominant political organisation in the United Kingdom. The arch-Brexiteers would [apparently] force the collapse of the May government if their diabolical mission to undermine the economy is defeated. An election before Christmas has become a strong possibility; thought not yet probable.
Corbyn has always regarded the EU as a capitalist club: so he has been against it, even though Labour under his leadership notionally supported the remainers in the 2016 referendum: where millions of old-Labour voters went the other way. I doubt if the Labour leader has a clear view of what the European Economic Area is: and it is problematic whether Keir Starmer can bring him to a sensible stance on that matter. This is the one factor that could loose a December [or February] election for Labour. Politics have suddenly become much more interesting: and more frightening!
Wednesday, 1 November 2017
Bitcoin Marches On
Nobody really knows what 'Bitcoin' is, or what damage it can do to the global economy. Some people know [but do not tell] who invented this 'virtual' pseudo-currency; several dozen people and firms have made money from trading in it, and it is rumoured that some people and firms have played in the market and lost.
No government has responsibility for bitcoin; but several governments could find themselves dealing with a crisis which arose from reckless or careless trading in this medium to the extent that it impinged badly on their national economy. It would be unconscionable if any government required its taxpayers to assist any firms or persons who found themselves in a bitcoin crisis; and it would be politically disastrous if any government thereby plunged its citizens into a decade of reduced living standards as the British government did with the bale-out of the banks in 2008.
There have been plenty of warnings from well-known market players, to the effect that this totally unregulated free-enterprise market has no substance and can thus cause major disruption in any economy that allows assets designated in this nonexistent medium to take a prominent place in anybody's asset register.
Despite this, and despite asserting even a few days ago that they would never allow their platform to be used for bitcoin-denominated trades, the CME [formerly known as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange] has announced that bitcoin will be allowed in trades passing through their books. It is immaterial that this is experimental, and is envisaged only ever to be a small sideline in the market. The big point is that one of the world's largest and most important exchanges has legitimated this bastard child of greed.
Gordon Brown's memoirs are being marketed, for a big launch next week. He would not have wished it, but the commentariat will concentrate primarily on his failure to develop a mature prime ministerial personality [with the resultant tantrums and failures] and on his success - with Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the day - in 'saving' the world banking system; at the long-term cost of the British people. In extracts that have been released already, Brown makes it clear that he deplores how completely his successors [the Tory-Lib coalition, the Cameron government and now the May regime] have totally failed to reform and rebuild the banking system so that it has the clarity of structure, the strength of reserves, and the separation of banking from wholesale gambling that were shown by the crisis to be absolutely necessary.
The Bank of England has warned that some 75,000 City jobs will migrate to Europe unless Britain gets a Brexit deal that keeps the country within the European Economic Area: but that is just the start of the catastrophe that could be played out if the bonkers Brexiteers ally with the 'free markets' lobby of wholesale gamblers in making the claim that any losses from legitimate banking and financial trading within the EU context can be replaced by growth in 'virtual' finance and betting.
Media muckrakers have found that Jacob Rees-Mogg was a notably unsuccessful fund manager in the period when Gordon Brown was at the apogee of his power, before the 2008 market failure. He is not a believable prophet of supposed good times that can follow from a 'hard Brexit'; nor is any other of the vociferous minority who are agitating for Britain to be plunged at the deep end of the shark-infested global market: if any of those buffoons comes out as an advocate of bitcoin, that will be proof positive of their intellectual limitations and perversity.
No government has responsibility for bitcoin; but several governments could find themselves dealing with a crisis which arose from reckless or careless trading in this medium to the extent that it impinged badly on their national economy. It would be unconscionable if any government required its taxpayers to assist any firms or persons who found themselves in a bitcoin crisis; and it would be politically disastrous if any government thereby plunged its citizens into a decade of reduced living standards as the British government did with the bale-out of the banks in 2008.
There have been plenty of warnings from well-known market players, to the effect that this totally unregulated free-enterprise market has no substance and can thus cause major disruption in any economy that allows assets designated in this nonexistent medium to take a prominent place in anybody's asset register.
Despite this, and despite asserting even a few days ago that they would never allow their platform to be used for bitcoin-denominated trades, the CME [formerly known as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange] has announced that bitcoin will be allowed in trades passing through their books. It is immaterial that this is experimental, and is envisaged only ever to be a small sideline in the market. The big point is that one of the world's largest and most important exchanges has legitimated this bastard child of greed.
Gordon Brown's memoirs are being marketed, for a big launch next week. He would not have wished it, but the commentariat will concentrate primarily on his failure to develop a mature prime ministerial personality [with the resultant tantrums and failures] and on his success - with Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the day - in 'saving' the world banking system; at the long-term cost of the British people. In extracts that have been released already, Brown makes it clear that he deplores how completely his successors [the Tory-Lib coalition, the Cameron government and now the May regime] have totally failed to reform and rebuild the banking system so that it has the clarity of structure, the strength of reserves, and the separation of banking from wholesale gambling that were shown by the crisis to be absolutely necessary.
The Bank of England has warned that some 75,000 City jobs will migrate to Europe unless Britain gets a Brexit deal that keeps the country within the European Economic Area: but that is just the start of the catastrophe that could be played out if the bonkers Brexiteers ally with the 'free markets' lobby of wholesale gamblers in making the claim that any losses from legitimate banking and financial trading within the EU context can be replaced by growth in 'virtual' finance and betting.
Media muckrakers have found that Jacob Rees-Mogg was a notably unsuccessful fund manager in the period when Gordon Brown was at the apogee of his power, before the 2008 market failure. He is not a believable prophet of supposed good times that can follow from a 'hard Brexit'; nor is any other of the vociferous minority who are agitating for Britain to be plunged at the deep end of the shark-infested global market: if any of those buffoons comes out as an advocate of bitcoin, that will be proof positive of their intellectual limitations and perversity.
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