What if the entire political response to the Great Financial Crisis could be summed up as “Punch the incumbent”? Americans threw out George Bush. Obviously this was overdetermined, but still, they did it in the winter of 2008. If you look around the democratic world, what seems to make the most difference is timing –…
Read More Throwing out the bumsA good post on the notion of “hard Keynesianism” raises some important questions about the recent past of the Labour Party. Hard Keynesianism is the doctrine that, if the government should run a deficit when there’s a negative output-gap and therefore unemployment, it should run a surplus when there’s a positive output-gap and therefore inflation.…
Read More Sometimes history is written by the losersA couple of News of the World things. Just before the Met dropped their effort to bully the Grauniad with the Official Secrets Act, they ran this story about the disastrous attempt to use a supergrass in the Daniel Morgan case. Is this a coincidence? And this quote reads like a Ballardised version of Le…
Read More is there a Corby trouser press, miniature kettle, and teabags in Room 101?This is wrong, not just for the methodological reasons given. The problem is more serious. What’s so great about optimal decisions after all? Absolute optimality has costs. Specifically, even if consultation doesn’t help you achieve an optimal decision, it may help avoid a decision that is dramatically pessimal for some particular person or group of…
Read More the worst thing that can happen is actually pretty badOK, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My problem with the whole “Blue Labour” concept, and further, the love-affair between people like James Purnell and American “community organisers” is this: If you’re so smart, why haven’t you got health insurance?” Seriously. Isn’t trying to learn from the American Left a bit like trying…
Read More oh fuck hell, it’s that extensive future-of-the-Labour-party post at last.David “I was right” Blanchflower’s Right Blog is right. On this occasion he’s right about polling results. The public apparently thinks that Osborne’s fiscal policy is bad for the economy, unfair, too fast, excessive, and is affecting their lives directly. They’re also worried about unemployment and public service cuts. Which they also think are “necessary”…
Read More Irrational policy designJust as so much Blair era culture-page handwringing about why my kids came back from university, in hindsight, was a way of not talking about wages, student debt, and housing, people tend to lose sight of the central role of politics when they make arguments about “filter bubbles”. The original post over at Flipchart Fairytales…
Read More Boundaries. Now there’s dull for youDid anyone notice that Liam Fox had an audience of Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, or I suppose they of him although you know how these things work around here, some time this spring? It’s in the latest MOD meetings disclosure, which runs up to March 2011. MOD is probably the most assiduous department for…
Read More all is right with the worldI bet you thought I was kidding. But try this lede: Taped to the inside of a Sainsbury’s window in King’s Lynn, a printout of a map reminds teenagers of the town’s restrictions. Next to it, a notice on Norfolk Constabulary headed paper spells out the terms of a dispersal order: within the marked area,…
Read More exclusion zoneTom Watson’s twitter feed linked the transcript of the BBC Radio story on re-opening the Daniel Morgan case. There’s not much in there that’s new if you’ve been reading this, but I’ve excerpted the best bits. 1: The story that vanished But the Report can tonight reveal that we’ve seen a copy of a witness…
Read More so…