Happy new year to everyone! It is starting out pretty poorly despite the nice weather and personal fun. On the last day of last year, the British Government released its Giving Green Paper, which apparently provides some detail about how it sees its Big Society concept working. As one commentator said it reads like it was written by a bunch of amateurs. But what it tells me is that the conservatives haven’t really evolved much since Maggie Thatcher declared there was no such thing as society. The Big Society is just a reprise of that concept with some mention of mobile phone apps and ATMs to match the historical period of technology that the latest attack on the welfare of the citizens is occurring. The Big Society is a blatant relinquishment of essential government roles and in that sense is a politically cynical attempt to cover up the impossibility of individual action relaxing systemic spending gaps. My training as a macroeconomists tells me that individuals cannot ease such macroeconomic constraints. Only the national government via appropriately sized budget deficits can do that. Which is exactly the responsibility the British government is recoiling from. The Big Society aka BS. More the fool anyone who believes in it.

It is a beautifully warm and sunny end to the 2010 which in general has been a pretty awful year. Yesterday, US Department of Labor released the latest Jobless Claims data. That was good news and suggested that not only has the fiscal expansion in the US been supporting growth but that the economy may be turning the corner – albeit very slowly. Earlier in the week the extremists – the unrelenting deficit terrorists who don’t understand what has been going on were at it again. Like an old gramophone record stuck in a worn out groove they chanted their mantras about record debt levels and how best to cut the deficit. They appear to be stuck in a pre-1971 monetary system as well and haven’t yet caught up with the fact that times have changed. We have CDs, DVDs, MP3s and a fiat monetary system. Anyway, I guess we know have an inkling as to their problem now – see this blog – We always knew it – their brains are thinner!. They do not seem capable of understanding that if you want deficits to fall then you need growth. Growth occurs because spending equals income – public or private the cash till operators don’t discriminate. When there is insufficient private spending to support robust growth, then you have to supplement it with public spending. End of story.

Research has shown conclusively in the past that those who undergo mainstream economics training are more selfish, less co-operative, less honest and less generous than other groups. These insidious qualities are reinforced and strengthen over the course of their undergraduate years. There has also been conjecture about the political role played by conservative economists – that is, that they provide authority for the industrial and financial elites to lobby politicians to introduce policy regimes that create the conditions whereby these groups can appropriate an ever increasing share of real income. They have been used to perpetuate the myth that the “business cycle” was dead and hence governments should have limited involvement in the “market economy” which was promoted as being self-regulating and capable of maximising wealth creation for the benefit of everyone. It was clear that this was always a sham and ideologically based rather than ground in any theoretical legitimacy or evidence-based standing. The fact that the mainstream failed to predict the crisis and have no tools in their models to provide a solution to the dramatic private spending collapse reinforced the notion that mainstream economists were ideological warriors. But new research has provided another clue – their brains are thinner!

Most of my blogs are about advanced nations. Many of these nations are being plunged back in time by misguided applications of fiscal austerity and even when growth returns they will take a decade or more to get back to the per capita income levels that prevailed prior to the crisis. Many children and teenagers in these nations will be denied essential education, training and workplace experience by the deliberate choice by their governments to entrench long-term unemployment and to starve their economies of jobs growth. But it remains that these nations are not poor in general and while people are losing houses and other items on credit only a small proportion will starve. Not so the poorer nations that I rarely write about. These are the nations where a high proportion of the citizens live below or around the poverty line. These are the nations that are at the behest of the IMF and suffer the most from their erroneous policy interventions. Today I reflect on how those nations have been going during this crisis. The bottom line is that the way the Fund reinvented itself and reimposed itself on the poorer nations after the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971 has damaged their growth prospects and ensured that millions of people around the world have remained locked in poverty. Along the way … children have died or have failed to receive the levels of public education that any child anywhere deserves. There is no positive role for the IMF in its current guise.

Sometimes ex-IMF officials shed the burden of having been associated with that institution and make a creative contribution to the public debate. More often they do not and continue to perpetuate the errors that underpin almost all of the IMF’s output. If there was ever an institution that has passed its use-by date it is the IMF. Today, ex-IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson (now at MIT) claimed that the way to assess fiscal sustainability is “whether a country has the political will to raise taxes or cut spending when under pressure from the financial markets”. You can imagine what I thought of that criterion! Not much but it is too late in the year to get really flustered and I have been listening to some pretty good music this afternoon. So for all those readers who have written in saying “doesn’t Johnson have credibility” and “therefore is what he is saying sensible” I have three words – No and No.

You know something is wrong when the unemployment rate in major holiday destinations persist at high levels. Typically, these areas have what economists refer to as seasonal unemployment – so that during the off-season (when the holiday makers are back home) there is very little labour market activity but once the vacation period begins there are many jobs and people. I have lived in various surf locations for many years and one such location had a steady-state population of 1000 or so residents and on Boxing Day this swelled to 25,000 and that new population endured for the ensuing holiday period (until the Australia Day weekend – January 26). Many of the surf crew and musicians would take jobs during this period and work very long hours (the surf was typically bad during the summer anyway) and use the savings to eke out an existence for the rest of the year – sometimes also accessing unemployment benefits sometimes not. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics published a bulletin (September 7, 2010) for the Cape Cod area which is one such major holiday region in the US. The situation there is dire and requires an immediate policy response from the US government. Unfortunately, this issue appears to be off the policy agenda. Well, until this week at least. A Democrat from Ohio has introduced a “full employment bill” which aims to eliminate the US central bank (good) and restore the US government’s currency sovereignty for keeps. The problem is that it goes down some dead-ends and avoids facing up to the real issues. So it is a well-motivated full employment bill – sort of!

I imagine a doctor when confronted with a set of symptoms being presented by a patient carefully goes through each one and draws on his/her bank of knowledge, understanding and experience to arrive at an interpretation. A patient that has been sick for some time and is in the early stages of recovery may still exhibit signs of stress and the doctor appreciates that and doesn’t ring any alarm bells. It seems that the same doesn’t apply to my profession. Members of my profession seem to jump on any bandwagon that arrives and which triggers their favourite narratives about excessive government spending and borrowing and all that sort of public misinformation. The most recent example of this came yesterday (December 21, 2010) when the UK Office of National Statistics released the latest data for Public Sector Finances (as at November 2010) which showed that British government spending continues to grow and tax revenue is still lagging. The press reaction and that of my colleagues was expected and as is typically the case way off beam. We can summarise the problem by stating that there is no such thing as a “weak” budget outcome. An economy can be weak but it makes no sense to say a budget outcome is weak unless you have an ideological bias towards some particular outcome.