Take a look at this graph of UK GDP growth from 1955 to just about now. Clearly, it's in two halves, as they say - but what marked the change of the roller coasters of the economy in the sixties, seventies and early eighties and the dull, mediocre, flat performance since then? The 2008 shock is the only visible bit of excitement (though the virus will do something interesting)
.. global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. By its own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse.He manages to miss the real reason for this dire economic performance despite describing its manifestation .
While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs.Yes, Globalism. What Globalism has managed to achieve is to destroy the benefits of the version of capitalism that made us rich up until about 1990. Oh not rich in terms of disposable incomes, consumer toys, cars that we don't own but in the important things.
You may also note that the falling of the Wall and the start of NATO's decline also coincides with this Globalism - indeed, helped to enable it. All economics is human behaviour, so here's an anecdote.
Back in the 1970s I had a gap year before going to university. At the end of the year, I had enough saved as a deposit on a little flint-rubble cottage, which cost the princely sum of £5,250. The attraction was the rear garden, which was huge, with a little orchard of six trees and enough room to run a gaggle of hens and grow a crop of tobacco - but that was for later years. I was going away, and my student grant wouldn't pay the mortgage - no problem. A quick call to the USAF produced the first of my Master Sergeants, superlative tenants whose rent payments were generous and warranted by the US government. That sort of thing was possible back in those spiky, variable years.
If you measure wealth not in the volume of cheap £10 electric drills and £5 jeans one can buy but in having a stake in the country, a country with a standing army of over 100,000, a navy of a least 50 warships and an air force with more than a handful of squadrons, in which there was the freedom to take the sort of financial risks that we did, and enjoy the rewards that we did, then we were rich. Pre-Globalism we also had personal freedom and independence to a far greater degree than subsists now, and even though the State owned a lot more business and industry than it does now, it was also somehow a much smaller State. The Big State that supports Globalism is also supported by what Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs -
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.The paradox, as Graeber points out, is that the new de-nationalised capitalist Neoliberal West shouldn't allow such massive economic inefficiencies, such a huge waste of resources. Yet it does. That's an answer in itself. What's the point of having a Big State, a regulatory state, if you don't have a society replete with willing, conformist drones to enforce all the regulations?
These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.
I'm sorry, but all the cheap Chinese electric drills in the world and the availability of flash new cars I don't own don't come close in compensating for the real wealth of those pre-Globalist days.
Update
=====
The costs to the UK economy of over regulation, from the IEA
The report concludes regulation has become a political tool, used to drive social or distributive objectives, rather than to correct market failures. Failure of regulation, including over-regulation, has led to increasing barriers to entry for new businesses, stagnating competition between incumbents, and in many cases no evidence of beneficial outcomes for consumers.
Regulations are being judged on their intentions – not their outcomes – and increasingly weak mechanisms for accountability of state regulators risk undermining the rule of law, the report warns.
20 comments:
“ Yes, Globalism. What Globalism has managed to achieve is to destroy the benefits of the version of capitalism that made us rich up until about 1990. Oh not rich in terms of disposable incomes, consumer toys, cars that we don't own but in the important things.”
In one.
Or the real wealth of a cohesive society with (mostly) law-abiding citizens who understood and applied and abided by common standards of behaviour.
Alexander Graham Bell also has a lot to answer for...
... As do all politicians since Attlee.
If only there was a genuine conservative party?
Unfortunately, as Hitchens pointed out to Dellers last week, there is absolutely no need to be conservative, when very few people understand what that means.
@Stephen J
The only conservatism which is understandable is that with a small "c." What the conservatism of the Tory party is will be anybody's guess since it has changed so many times in order to retain power. It tried to change from Thatcherism to Neo-liberalism with predictably hilariously disasterous results. Boris seems to want D'israelean "One Nation" Toryism: I wish him luck.
"buy cheap, buy twice" is a useful lesson to learn and also illustrates that low cost isn't the be-all and end-all of consumerism.
I do note that there is a thriving (and growing) market in people buying/selling 'old stuff' that is clearly seen to be of much higher quality and longevity.
The concept of a cheap, globalist-inspired, consumerist society is showing signs of stress - we even have 'modern' incentives to force manufacturers to make products repairable rather than throw-away now.
Perhaps there is hope?
You might as well blame the ills of today on the disappearance of elm trees, which also coincided with the end of that era.
You do mention the end of the Soviet Union, however. That was instrumental. Up until then, the ruling elites were genuinely frightened of something, and so capitalist economies had to offer their people decent jobs with security, occupational pensions and the rest.
Once Reagan crowed "we have won the cold war" they knew that they could treat people as they liked, and that no one would harm a hair on their heads, as the supply of semtex etc. to rebels such as the IRA was about to dry up too.
It was the absence of fear, which emboldened our oppressors, as it always is.
I'd give it them back all right.
You've cracked it Raedwald, we hire 100,000 people, get them polishing boots and stomping up and down some tarmac and polishing and painting some old unreliable junk. Problem solved.
But that 100,000 plus all the other military forces did achieve something. Unintentionally they released a few billions of well motivated people into the global workforce. The price of labour has never been the same.
Seems to me we ought to drag out the 'Lump of Work Fallacy' and take another look at it. Perhaps there is a lump of work and it is now spread around a bit more widely. The obvious rejoinder is 'why not make more work' so that all the rest can have some. So why not?
There is no real resource limitation provided one ignores Greta and friends. There must be a good economic reason, forget the unpleasant effects, they would be ignored if the money were really there. But the money is not there, we can turn out all the Iphones and leccy cars and tellys and drills anyone would ever want from existing factories.
Why does no-one make Iphones in Cleethorpes. Because the people and land there are too expensive. Why, because demand from the middle classes has pushed up housing costs and land values. But we dare not push down land and housing costs. And the main problem is land and housing. Therein lies the rub. You can't have a prosperous middle class AND an prosperous working class AND high house/land prices.
The cost of over-regulation is appalling you're quite correct. And so is the cost of over-government.
If you consider that in most industrial economies nowadays the weight of government spending is around 45-50% of GDP, and if you further consider that anecdotally around 50% of that spend is wasted, then the maths tells you that if we corrected that we could work a four day week with no loss of wealth.
The Bullshit jobs started back in the early Nineties with Major's charter marks. People had to get trained to attain some bullshit standard and got a certificate. Training agency jobs soared.
Then in the Blair years it really got out of hand: more and more jobs required more and more paperwork to prove some standard or other and the jobless were sent on training courses where they sat round and did nothing and learned nothing of note.
Management jobs required documentary proof of skills learned on a training course rather than learned actually doing the job. Recruiters covered their arses by requesting paper skills rather than real skills, so if the new guy turned out to be a complete imbecile, at least they had the correct paperwork and the blame was somewhere else.
But the training and accreditation industry boomed during the Blair years and continues to add nothing of value to the job market, other than keeping people who can only teach rather than do off the unemployment stats.
Training jobs, retail jobs, it's all part of the bullshit money-go-round economy where nothing of substance is really made and there is only an illusion of productivity.
I've always said the cost of regulation is invisible, until the weight of it breaks the camels back. You can call it 'globalism' if you like, the reality is if the Uk government tomorrow unilaterally repealed 2/3rds of the laws on the statute book and just let people do stuff without regulating them into not doing it, the economy would boom like we haven't seen in decades, if ever. Regardless of what the rest of the world did, or didn't.
I'm a farmer, there's lots of business projects I could do on my farm, work I could provide to people, but the rewards aren't worth the hassle. So I don't. As someone once memorably put it, Atlas Shrugs.
@Sobers.
Nail, head etc.
I'm a small food enterprise that is mandated to have the water supply tested annually despite the fact that I use BOTTLED WATER to cook with.
The 'tap water' is from a private source, twice UV'd and three-times filtered - never mind the fact that I would be an idiot to poison my (small) customer based, the local pen-pushers have to test my water yearly for the sum of £275. WATER I DON'T EVEN USE.
Thanks EU. Cnuts.
Globalism's first 'stress test' started back in December with a virus that looks set to interfere with one its primary goals: No Nations, No Borders. Most people think Globalism is about economics but the reality is the reordering of societies. Everything changes when societies get ripped by methodologies such as multiculturalism. This is a hundred year multi-generational project headed-up by the UN, who also set agendas such as 'Climate Change' - which really is about economics and the redistribution of wealth from First World countries. If you put your ear to the line you can hear the train coming long before you see it.
Steve
The great-grandparents of the people doing bullshit jobs were domestic servants. Domestic service is just as useless as being a diversity officer.
Don Cox
You like a small state but you're ok with adding 50,000 form fillers to handle post-Brexit red-tape.
50,000 form fillers is greater that the EU 'civil service' combined.
David Graeber might have half a brain. You, on the other hand are signalling differently.
On topic:
Viral Marketing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=-727K585amo&feature=emb_logo
Steve
Looks like a cunningly concealed exercise of a subset of the UN "Agenda21" Steve?
Did you see who funded "Event 2(0)1 Steve?
Quote from the website that accompanied the video link that you provided:
"Event 201 was supported by funding from the Open Philanthropy Project."
I don't suppose that is anything to do with a certain Mr. S0r0s?
Stephen J said @ 08:22
'Did you see who funded "Event 2(0)1 Steve?'
Yes it was our old friend Mr György Schwartz.
Steve
Post a Comment