Traces the development of my 2017 book published by Pluto Press

Governments must restore the capacity to allow them to run large infrastructure projects effectively

One of the major complaints that Milton Friedman and his ilk made about the use of discretionary fiscal policy was that time lags made it ineffective and even dangerously inflationary. By the time the policy makers have worked out there is a problem and ground out the policy intervention, the problem has passed and the intervention then becomes unpredictable in consequence (and unnecessary anyway). The Financial Times article (March 29, 2021) – To compare the EU and US pandemic packages misses the point – written by Ireland’s finance minister reminded me of the Friedman debate in the 1960s. Apart from the fact that the article is highly misleading (aka spreading falsehoods), it actually exposes a major problem with the way the European Commission operates. If Friedman’s claim ever had any credibility, then, they would fairly accurately describe how the European Union deals with economic crises. Always too little, too late … and never particularly targetted at the problem. The debate remains relevant though as governments move away a strict reliance on monetary policy and realise that fiscal policy interventions are the only way forward. Most governments around the world are talking big on public infrastructure projects. However, the design of such interventions must be carefully considered because they can easily be dysfunctional. Further, thinking these projects are a replacement for short-term cash injections is also not advised. I consider these issues in this blog post.

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The ‘disciplining role of markets’ should be replaced by the disciplining role of democracy

When we elect governments we should expect that they will do what they promised and represent our best interests. We don’t expect them to represent a small, privileged sector of the economy at the expense of the rest of it. The problem is that we overlay these aspirations onto an economic ownership system which has a different logic to our understanding of the operations of a democratic state. And mainstream economics gives reverence and priority to the logic of capitalism rather than ensuring that the quality of democracy is maintained. Which reflects its origins – as an apologist for the unequal ownership of the material means of production and the consequences that arise from that inequality. We keep seeing a restatement of that priority from prominent policy makers and while that generation is in charge it will be hard to really shift the paradigm.

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It is a syndemic not a pandemic – broader policies are needed

There was an article in The Lancet from its editor (September 26, 2020) – Offline: COVID-19 is not a pandemic – which questioned the “narrow approach” that governments were taking to the coronavirus pandemic based on the assumption that “the cause of this crisis … [is] … an infectious disease”. His argument is a whole of medical professionals have become prominent in daily press briefings and the like as they trot out the results of epidemic models and news agencies interview “infectious disease specialists” every other day. But the reality is that “(t)wo categories of disease are interacting within specific populations” – COVID-19 and “an array of non-communicable diseases” which are “clustering within social groups according to patterns of inequality deeply embedded in our societies”. He thus used the term ‘syndemic’ rather than pandemic to highlight the socio-economic distribution of the pandemic and focus attention on inequality and other forms of socio-economic disadvantage which interact with biological dimensions to determine health outcomes. He focuses on co-morbidities but I would focus on poor working conditions, poor housing, inadequate nutrition, the stress of poverty and poor urban planning that segments populations into leafy, low-density suburbs and suburban hell-holes where people are crammed in like whatever due to social inequalities and deficient government policy interventions.

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The pandemic is demonstrating that we can resist neoliberalism

A few snippets today, being Wednesday and my short-form blog day (sometimes). I will have a few announcements to make early next week. One will concern a streaming lecture I will be giving next Tuesday as part of my usual work in Finland this time of the year. The title of my talk will be: Political economy thought and praxis post pandemic. I give an annual public lecture in Helsinki but this time it will be coming from the East Coast of Australia, given the pandemic. Details about access will be coming early next week (Monday’s blog post). For now some comments on the pandemic.

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(Re)municipalisation – purging the barbarians from inside the gate

This post is a followup to a blog post I wrote a few weeks ago – ABCD, social capital and all the rest of the neoliberal narratives to undermine progress (November 12, 2020) – where I discussed the trends in government policy delivery and regional and community development thinking, which have emerged in the neoliberal period and attack the idea of government. These approaches claim that
only through the development of social capital and a reliance on local initiatives, free of government interference, can communities reach their latent potential. These ideas have led to the scrapping of regional development planning (replaced by new regionalism), outsourcing of welfare policies (replaced by social entrepreneurship) and other madcap approaches (like ABCD). Our public service bureaucracies have bee converted from service delivery agencies into contracted brokering and management agencies (to oversee the outsourcing and privatisation of public service delivery) and have, often, been filled up with characters who are borderline sociopaths. The point is that it is not the ‘state’ that is at fault but the ideologues that have taken command of the state machinery and reconfigured it to serve their own agenda, which just happen to run counter to what produces general well-being. Today, I continue to analyse that theme and outline what needs to be done to rebuild our damaged public sectors.

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ABCD, social capital and all the rest of the neoliberal narratives to undermine progress

I was in a meeting the other day and one of the attendees announced that they were sick of government and were looking at other solutions such as social capital and community empowerment to solve the deep problems of welfare dependency that they were concerned about. The person said that all the bureaucrats had done was to force citizens onto welfare with no way out. It had just made them passive and undermined their free will. It was a meeting of progressive people. I shuddered. This is one of those narratives that signal surrender. That put up the white flag in the face of the advancing neoliberal army intent on destroying everything in its way. The ultimate surrender – individualise and privatise national problems of poverty, inequality, exclusion, unemployment – and propose solutions that empower the individuals trapped in ‘le marasme économique’ created by states imbued with neoliberal ideology. The point is that the Asset-Based-Community-Development (ABCD) mob, the social capital gang, the new regionalists, the social entrepreneurs are just reinforcing the approach that creates the problems they claim they are concerned about. The point is that it is not the ‘state’ that is at fault but the ideologues that have taken command of the state machinery and reconfigured it to serve their own agenda, which just happen to run counter to what produces general well-being. That is why I shuddered and took a deep breath.

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Tracing the roots of progressive views on the duty to work – Part 6

This is Part 6 of my on-going examination of the concept of ‘duty to work’ and how it was associated with the related idea of a ‘right to work’. Neoliberalism has broken the nexus between the ‘right to work’ responsibilities that the state assumed in the social democratic period and the ‘duty to work’ responsibilities that are imposed on workers in return for income support. That break abandons the binding reciprocity that enriched our societies and has spawned a solid argument for a basic income. But the solution to the problem is to reinstate the link between opportunity to work and the societal benefits of work, especially as it enhances the material well-being of the least advantaged. In this part, I explore that theme.

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Tracing the roots of progressive views on the duty to work – Part 5

This is Part 5 of my on-going examination of the concept of ‘duty to work’ and how it was associated with the related idea of a ‘right to work’. In Part 4, I demonstrated that the dual concepts were long-standing ideas and the emergence of neoliberalism distorted their meaning by, one, abandoning the commitment by governments to facilitating the right to work, and, two, perverting the meaning of duty to work. Neoliberalism thus has broken the nexus between the ‘right to work’ responsibilities that the state assumed in the social democratic period and the ‘duty to work’ responsibilities that are imposed on workers in return for income support. That break abandons the binding reciprocity that enriched our societies. In this part, I examine the way in which full employment and work has been treated within the justice literature to extend the notion of reciprocity that we discussed in Part 4. In Part 5 I will consider how this bears on discussions about basic income and coercion.

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MMT blows the cover on the fictional world of mainstream economics that serves class interests

Given I presented a full analysis of the National Accounts release yesterday, I am calling today Wednesday and not writing much by way of blog posting, to give me more time to write other things that have to be done. But there is one issue that I will deal with today and regularly comes up and indicates that we are making progress. And after that we can all ‘Rise and Shine’ with some beautiful music.

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