The laboratories are multiplying. We are in an interesting period – I say that in an intellectual sense only – where stark policy decisions have been taken based on certain theoretical economic claims and regular data is arriving which allows us to assess the viability of those claims. So as a researcher it is interesting. As a person I don’t find it interesting that governments are prepared to gamble with peoples’ lives in a self-serving way to appease the elites that fund them. For many years we have had Japan as an Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) laboratory. I gave a talk here in Maastricht yesterday and asked how any mainstream economic theory could explain Japan over the last two decades or so. By any standards if the mainstream macroeconomic theories were of any value then Japan should have very high interest rates and accelerating inflation and the government should have gone broke. It hasn’t and that tells you the value of mainstream theory. Now we have various fiscal austerity experiments being undertaken and the data is coming in daily to tell us that the claims made about the certainty of a “fiscal contraction expansion” are spurious. The most recent British labour force data released this week provides a very interesting laboratory terrain. Two geographic regions within the same nation, two governments (of different status) and two very different economic policy approaches. Result: one side of the border the labour market deteriorates, the other side it improves. So this blog is a tale of those two labour markets – one south of a border the other north. The data provides further evidence that fiscal austerity damages economic prosperity.