What People Want

We hear a lot about what women want, but do not find a corresponding amount in terms of what women get. Power is still predominantly a men's game - just observe the token woman who still routinely appears on question-time-style panel debates. Women need to move on from using their excellent communication skills and hone the skills of power. Personally, I have never spent any time on 'women's studies' because the fact that so many women (and so few men) do is part of the reason there are so few female economists and politicians.

But I'm going to break my rule to address a new report by the Centre for Policy Studies that is ruffling feminist feathers. The report is based on a survey of 4500-odd men and women and found that, of the mothers interviewed, 12 per cent did not want to work. We were not given figures for the number of men - with children or otherwise - who did not want to work.

Because that is the problem, really, isn't it? This discussion, like the debate last month about whether the children of working women do worse at school, is framed in terms of a nuclear family, with two heterosexual parents, one of whom has a penis and thrives in the workplace, the other of whom has mammaries and yearns to make pretty cushions.

Starting from that assumption you can arrive at a whole lot of different conclusions, and generate the sort of heated debate between old-school feminists, who found their own freedom through work and now argue that vast sums in taxation should be spent bribing other women to do the same, and Tory ladies whose well-paid husbands can afford to subsidise their lives spent at the gym or the WI.

According to the BBC's account of the report: 'The poll found only 1% of mothers and 2% of fathers (with children under five) thought the mother in a family, where the father worked and there were small children, should work full-time. Nearly half said she should not work at all.' But how many thought the man should not work? Or that they should decide to genuinely share parenting? Were they even offered this option?

Nobody asks the men if they want to go to work - especially men outside the chattering classes who do the most unpleasant work. No one is thinking creatively about how bringing up children can be shared within a loving community of men and women. Even the feminists do not question how their daughters will feel about balancing their wish to be loving mothers and their desire to function in the world, when they have spent their working lives struggling to park them in childcare while not challenging the model that says men are more likely to be working than women.

The person who seeks self-actualisation in the post-modern, managerialised workplace is a very sad person indeed. The image of the population as no more than millions of Dobbie-style house elves, eager to meet every latest target, is a false and depressing one. This discussion of work is mythologised (see my rather dated attempts to unpick some of these myths here) and does an injustice to the millions of working people in this country - of both sexes - for whom work is a humiliating daily grind that crushes their creativity and erodes their self-respect. Tweet

The End of Hegemoney?

Now that the cracks caused by the earthquake that struck the global economy last year have been papered over to the satistfaction of most casual observers, and with stock markets forging ahead (fuelled by the quantitatively eased money that cannot be found for the public sector), the more interesting consequences of the financial crisis are beginning to unwind.

The most potentially momentous is the threat to the hegemonic position of the dollar in world capitalism. Way back at the G20 in April - when our attention was successfully diverted by the trivial tittle-tattle about bankers' bonuses - the Chinese kept their eye on the ball. They joined the Russians in proposing a new neutral international currency to replace the dollar. This call was repeated yesterday by a UN panel - was it a coincidence that this happened on the same day that news leaked about secret deals between the oil states, the Chinese, Russia, France and Japan to end the rule of the petro-dollar by trading petroleum for a basket of currencies? And from a UK perspective, notice which of the 'leading world economies' is missing from this list.

The embarrassing visit by Hilary Clinton to Beijing in February, where she effectively begged the Chinese to continue buying US debt, indicated the desperate position of the US economy - and polity. With quantitative easing on a grand scale being the only thing keeping the once-mighty dollar afloat its credibility as the foundational currency for the world economic system is utterly undermined. If China ends the rather one-sided deal by which it acquires pointless bits of paper in exchange for massive quantities of consumer goods, the financial crisis will return with a vengence and the US economy will be sucked down into the whirlpool of its own debt.

But are the Chinese seriously proposing the Yuan as a viable alternative? Can the currency of a state capitalist economy play the role of currency of first preference in the global economy? China is now selling its own debt in Yuan rather than dollars and because their currency is backed up by real economic power it should prove popular with investors. But the Yuan is not subject to even the limited influence of speculative movement by international capital. It is non-convertible and still politically controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. It is this control that has enabled China to expand so successfully, because it never faced the risk of having its currency picked off by global capital if it looked too threatening, as happened with the once fierce Asian tigers and the Russian rouble in the late 1990s.

So what is China's game? What does it plan to do with the power its people have won for their state through their hard manual work over the past 30 years? For the sake of humanity let us hope that they plan to use this power as political leverage over the US at Copenhagen. The US needs to be helped to manage its way down from the position of bloated, gun-toting pariah that controlling the world's hegemonic currency has left it in. If the US offers a serious movement on carbon reductions in December, perhaps the rest of the world can allow it a graceful descent, rather than the catastrophic demise which China could precipitate at any moment if it were to flood the market with US Treasuries, or refuse to buy more.

The asset bubble that led to last year's financial crisis began way back in 1971, when Nixon reneged on the Bretton Woods deal. The supreme economic dominance that the US has enjoyed since then was won by foul means, not fair ones. The people of the world and the planet itself have borne the cost in wars the US should not have been able to afford to fight and a lifestyle that was never earned from its own work or resources. But secret deals between the leaders of a small number of powerful nations is no way forward for a peaceful and stable world. We need to repeat the call for a global financial structure to be negotiated democratically, not fought out between Washington's Dogs of War and the dinosaurs of the Chinese Communist Party. Tweet

True Blue Never Fails

At last the Tories have come out of their policy closet and given some detail on what they actually plan to do after the next election. And we see that they are the same old party. Their response to a recession is to cut public spending and pick on the vulnerable. Cuts in the health budget and tax breaks for business: business as usual for the true blues.

The slogan for the first day of 'business' was peculiarly misplaced: getting Britain working. It is hard to see how forcing the sick and disabled from one form of social security benefit to another is going to create the millions of jobs that our economy is short of, according to the conventional economic paradigm, based as it is on wage slavery. Any attempt to resort to the traditional pasttime of threatening the marginal with starvation is more likely to get Britain robbing.

Why is it that those on the right are so desperate to force others into unpleasant, poorly paid jobs, that generate little of value and a great deal of carbon dioxide emissions? Could it be that they detest their own jobs and feel others should suffer alike? Light greens are much more likely to offer to share some of their work through reducing work hours, or their income through a citizens' income scheme. Darker greens would argue for freeing access to resources - especially land - so that people can provide for their own needs outside the market system.

And what of the Tories' promise to be the 'new green'? This fake and shallow veneer has rapidly peeled away. 'The environment' will barely feature at this week's conference as the planet's fair-weather friends revert to type and blow on the dog-whistle of oppressive Victorian policies that works so well within their electoral niche.

As Colin Hines argued back in the spring, within the conventional paradigm the obvious answer to the two-sided crisis of environment and economy is to send the quantitative easing money in the direction of real green jobs, with real green consequences: retrofitting Britains' tragically leaky housing stock would be a good place to start.

It's hard to know whether the reason this will not happen is that Boy George can't work out the economics - or whether he just can't resist his in-built propensity to beat up on the working people of this country. Or perhaps I should say the people who would be working if the money that might have enabled this had not all been spent on those who live from rents rather than wages. Tweet

Money system of last resort

In a system that relies on debt to create money, as capitalist money systems do, there is always a temptation for individual banks to take imprudent risks and be unable to repay their creditors. Because greed tempts bankers to destabilise their own business, and a run on the bank leading to bank collapse would undermine faith in the whole system, capitalist economies have a 'lender of last resort'.

The lender of last resort in the UK economy is the Bank of England. When banks hit sticky times they turn to the Old Lady for a shot in the arm, and she must oblige. This is exactly what happened last year, when banks had massively over-borrowed, they were loaned vast sums by the Bank.

You may be left asking where this money came from: who were the creditors? The answer is that, because there was no one left to lend money, the government itself acted as what we might think of as the 'borrower of last resort'.* When all else fails, a government can decide to create money by political fiat - the quantitative easing policy. And who do they borrow money from? The answer, I'm afraid, is you and me - and we are now being asked to pay this back through spending cuts, higher taxes and more work.

Leaving aside the question of whether the UK is really capable of paying back this level of debt without unacceptable suffering and civil unrest, let us consider for a while longer the concept of a borrower of last resort. When demand in the economy is so low that we are in a self-reinforcing downward spiral, as we are now, a capitalist economy requires the government to step in and borrow, just as it would expect the central bank to step in and lend to banks. So rather than cuts and austerity in the public sector we need to see borrowing and investment.

So far I have only considered the last resort in a financial sense, but what about the ecological crisis we are facing: the ultimate situation of last resort. Surely it is time for the government to act as borrower of last resort and produce a massive spending package to create the infrastructure and home renovation projects we need to achieve the carbon reduction targets that are now enshrined in law? Mad as it may seem, if you insist on creating money as debt, that is the only way that we are ever going to be able to buy ourselves a future.

*Thanks to Richard Douthwaite for this useful thought - and so many others. Tweet

Time to Buy Gold

Once upon a time I was taught by Danny Blanchflower. No, I have never played football, I'm talking about the economist of that name - well his name is really David Blanchflower but he told us that only his mother still calls him that. He was moonlighting from his day job at the University of Guildford to teach we humble Open University students.

He was ambitious and found himself a job at an Ivy League College in the States. Some time spent on the other side of the Atlantic is an essential stepping stone to a successful career as an economist, and membership of the Monetary Policy Committee a proof that you have arrived. So Blanchflower is an entirely pukka economist - the fact that he has published his latest tirade against spending cuts in the New Statesman is more an indication of the pusillanimous behaviour by the mainstream media than that he is a radical outsider.

What Blanchflower is trying to say, or scream, is that the recession is not over. If you look at the figures this is clear. Just look at the one graph that I've included with this post. It plots a comparison between the Baltic Dry Index and the price of gold. The first is a direct measure of how much stuff is trekking around the world; the second a measure of investor fear. When the shit really hits the fan you should put all your spare money into gold (I won't charge you for that nugget of advice since I know that if you read this blog you don't have any spare money!).

Of course I also agree whole-heartedly with Blanchflower's critiques of the economics profession. I remember him as a fairly conservative person, who thought I was a crazed hippy, but he did ring alarm bells about the house-price boom and he did call for cuts in interest rates long before his fellows on the MPC - and at a time when they might have made a difference.

He thought I was naive, but I would like to repay the compliment. Is it not rather naive to expect economics professors and politicians to come out and criticise an economic system that is deliberately constructed to suit their interests? And even more so to think that either party will give a damn about youth unemployment and the psychological pain caused to a 'lost generation'?

The meeting of the G20 in Pittsburgh was apparently intended to address the imbalances and distortions in the world economy. But the vision does not seem to extend beyond talking about limiting the bonuses of bank executives and the media is dominated by headlines about Iran. In one sense this is not so illogical: another foreign war would boost economic activity for certain sectors and might well put some of our young people back to work - and remove others permanently from the risk of unemployment.

But genuine attempts to address the causes of the economic crisis are either not being made or not being reported. The elite leaders of global capitalism are still seeing their role as trying to persuade us that all is fine and we should just carry on shopping as usual. I wish Danny well in his attempt to appeal to a more democratic tradition, where we still felt our power might be expressed through the ballot-box rather than the credit card. Tweet

Underwear Economist

I've always been the sort of person who wants to get to the bottom of things. When my book Market, Schmarket was published in 2006 I had included an exploration of the excessive focus on prices in modern markets and the way this led to an undermining of quality. I unwisely focused the discussion around the underwear market, specifically that for women's knickers.

Needless to say, this attracted more attention than the other 250-odd pages put together and turned me overnight into the underwear economist - the doyenne of the news in brief column. The article published in the Welsh national newspaper under the title 'Knickers to Global Capitalism' was proudly displayed on the board outside my office door for several months. I am even more proud to think that I may have played some small role in encouraging John-Paul Flintoff to embark on his personal spiritual quest that resulted in making his own y-fronts.

My services were put to good social use when a colleague who works for a charity working with street-sex workers in Bristol asked my advice on knickers that would be long-lasting and capable of dealing with some fairly rough treatment. My answer at the time was People Tree, although I have since discovered the intriguing campaign group Pants to Poverty and we also have the delight of Green Knickers.

It is clear that in this area, puns are as cheap as the underwear itself. But, if I can be excused, I think it is encouraging that such a fundamental item of clothing, and yet one that can so easily be hidden from the public gaze, has been the subject of such intense web- and soul-searching. Tweet

Seeking In-Vestas in the Future

Our man on the ground at the Isle of Wight Vestas site (well, mostly up a tripod watching for coppers, as it happens) reports that the action to keep the wind turbines in this country is happening now and bodies are needed.

More information is avaiable from the workers' website Tweet