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Business and Society Equality Inequality Politics

Equality of Voice and ‘Devo-localism’

  That’s where the real constitutional debate needs to be – around a radical constitutional option that puts Scotland back into the hands of its people: devo-local, if you like. Trevor Davies, The Scotsman 10/5/2012  [Politicians] see themselves as propping up something which is tottering rather than letting citizens build anew something that is soundly […]

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Economics Inequality Politics

Unemployment and Policy

This post is on 2 pages. Please click on the appropriate page number at bottom of text to navigate. There’s a very interesting take on UK unemployment trends in the July NIESR Review, written by the NIESR director Jonathan Portes. One should perhaps bear in mind that he has previously worked to formulate employment policy […]

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Business and Society Inequality News Politics

The Riots of August 2011

The riots that engulfed London and other cities in England began one year ago today. Just to hark back to my piece ‘Riots: Looking Deeper’ on this topic last year, written one week after they started. I think it’s fair to say that it was a reasonable analysis. In particular the Independent Panel set up […]

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Economics Equality Politics

Beyond ‘The Spirit Level’ – Tackling Inequality

This is a response to ‘The Spirit Level’ and the response to it, with discussion of the implications to be drawn for tackling inequality. You can also download it as a pdf (67kb). This article is on 5 pages, and you can go to the next page you want by clicking on the relevant  number […]

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Business and Society Philosophy Politics

Capitalism Meets its Match?

Whichever side of the argument you might be on, it’s worth looking at a very cogent and entertaining video talk by the late Professor G.A Cohen on some of the problems of ‘actually existing capitalism’.  I found it while following up a reading of his Tanner Lecture, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, given at Stanford University in 1990-91, which contains a powerful argument against […]

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Business and Society Economics Politics

What Equality? – Equality of Voice

‘We need to be clear how equality, and what kind of equality (including of what), services our notion of the good society.’ To give David Miliband some credit, he is asking the right question. It’s not clear from his New Statesman sally whether he has the right answer. As characterised by the older brother, ‘Reassurance […]

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Business and Society Economics Politics

Austerity is political

This article was published on LabourList on Thursday 12th January 2012. That there is ‘no money left’ is presented to us as an economic fact of life. The Conservatives have embraced it and the Liberal Democrats accepted it. Led by the authors of ‘In the black Labour’ we are at risk of falling in with […]

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Business and Society Economics Politics

Blue Labour and Immigration

This article was published on LabourList on 2nd August 2011. Immigration, by being freighted with so many unsaid and often unconsidered subtexts, is a toxic subject. As both Marc Stears and Anthony Painter have suggested on LabourList recently, it certainly seems to have poisoned the ‘Blue Labour’ project, possibly fatally.

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Business and Society Economics Politics

Blue Labour Political Economy: Equality of Voice

This is an essay on the approach to economics suggested by Maurice Glasman’s essay ‘Labour as a Radical Tradition’. Glasman’s essay forms part of the ebook ‘The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox’. I’m not particularly keen on the ‘Blue Labour’ moniker, but the ideas behind Maurice Glasman’s approach bear serious examination. Interestingly, his […]

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Business and Society Economics

What is economics for? Part 2

My last blog claimed that equilibrium economics is a fig-leaf for the rich and powerful – because it is a justification for preserving the status quo. But it is more than that, because the conditions required for reaching any such equilibrium (the point at which prices of goods and services have adjusted so that everyone […]