George Irvin
George Irvin is a Research Professor at the University of London (SOAS) and author of 'Super Rich: the Growth of Inequality in Britain and the United States', Cambridge, Polity Press, 2008.
Has Angela Merkel outlived her usefulness?
Steven Hill’s recent paean to Angela Merkel on the SEJ website (18/08/10) may yet prove woefully ill-advised. For although he is correct in arguing that ‘social’ Germany is well ahead of the USA is many respects, his endorsement of Merkel’s economics is—to put it as politely as possible—somewhat overenthusiastic.
The Spirit Level’s Political Wobble: The Inequality Debate Rages On
Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone is an admirable book and has generated a long-overdue debate about the high social costs of inequality. Inequality is not just about the poor staying poor; it is about the huge leap in income and wealth of the rich, or ‘super rich’ as [...]
Two decades of the Brussels Consensus
Has the financial and economic crisis changed things—sadly not! If anything, Eurozone governance has taken a turn for the worse. The deficit hawks have grown bigger and bolder. Egged on by the Greek experience, most Brussels economists seem to believe that budgets must be balanced at whatever cost.
Running a permanent Fiscal Deficit?
Recently, The Independent ran a tabloid-style headline warning that the true UK net debt-GDP ratio was not 60% but a colossal 285%, a figure that includes new ONS estimates of future state pension and off-balance PFI obligations. Why is this misleading? Because if we count a stream of future obligations in the stock of current [...]
Method in our Budget Madness?
Why has the general public bought into the TINA (There Is No Alternative) deficit reduction story? And what about our political class? Cameron, Clegg and Cable have allegedly ‘seen the light’ and emerged convinced that Britain needs huge cuts to stave off disaster. Brown and Darling differed only with respect to the timing of deficit [...]
Competitiveness through Cuts?
A standard piece of textbook economics is that if a country cannot devalue, it must cut real wages to increase labour productivity and make its exports more attractive. Indeed, it is argued quite plausibly that the main reasons for Germany’s successful export performance in the past decade is that real wages have remained flat, despite [...]
Nick Clegg’s Economic Illiteracy
Speaking to John Humphrys on the Today programme a few days ago (24 June), Nick Clegg sounded particularly uncomfortable dealing with the verdict of the Institute of Fiscal Studies that the budget would hit the poor harder than the rich. But Clegg’s economic illiteracy revealed itself most clearly when he declared that the budget pain [...]
The End of Social Europe?
As a further round of economic crisis unfolds, many European social democrats seem frozen like a hare in a car’s headlights. They have nothing new to say about how to deal with fiscal deficits – except that the cuts must not occur all at once and that the most vulnerable must be shielded. Otherwise, economists [...]
The Perfect Storm?
In early 2009, Paul Krugman gave a series of lectures at the London School of Economics on the global economic crisis in which he warned about the danger of a ‘perfect storm’ hitting the economy. The scenario he sketched was that of a fragile recovery in 2010-11 being hit by an inflationary spike, leading to [...]
The Eye of the Euro-Storm
The European project is in deep crisis. Angela Merkel’s ban on the short selling of Eurobonds in Germany is symptomatic of the European political elite’s lack of a coherent response to the crisis, just as was the confused ‘shock and awe’ bailout ten days ago. Ironically, the financial markets have recognised this confusion by redoubling [...]
UK: The Strange Death of the Rainbow Coalition
In a few hours on Tuesday the 11th of May, the vision of a coalition between Labour and the LibDems appeared briefly and then evaporated. There are many different version of why it could not succeed; Clegg’s personal affinity with Cameron, the speed with which John Reid and other Labour tribalists denounced it and the [...]
The EU must act on a Tobin Tax
Have Gordon Brown, Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and other EU leaders dropped their support for a Tobin tax, or will they press home the idea in the near future? This question is crucial, particularly now that there are widespread plans for ‘budget cuts’ amongst EU member states, including possible rises in VAT in the UK. [...]
