debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The world used to be divided into the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’. During the past decade the concept of the developing world has been successfully challenged: the countries that used to be so described have now been disaggregated. Countries such as China and India have diverged quite fundamentally from those like Chad and Afghanistan. Viewed [...]
What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of the robots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, this question crops up whenever unemployment rises. In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo considered the possibility that machines would replace labor; Karl Marx followed him. Around the same time, the Luddites smashed [...]
A most recent study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adult humans alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the total world wealth. The bottom half of the [...]
The history of economics is largely a struggle between two opposing schools of thought, “liberalism” and “mercantilism.” Economic liberalism, with its emphasis on private entrepreneurship and free markets, is today’s dominant doctrine. But its intellectual victory has blinded us to the great appeal – and frequent success – of mercantilist practices. In fact, mercantilism remains [...]
Forty years ago a British Conservative Prime Minister coined the phrase ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ to describe the practices of some companies. This month David Cameron, the current British Conservative Prime Minister, honourably returned to the same theme. Like any Conservative, Cameron recognizes that good companies are essential for mass prosperity. Their core attribute [...]
In 2009 Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahles published a short pamphlet, Building the Good Society and with the support of Compass and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation it has been debated across Europe. A study by Goettingen University cites this Good Society debate as the most influential current in European Social Democracy. Three years later we [...]
British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband has been accused of being wonky and clunky at speeches but easy and more conversational in interactions. If TV vox pop interviews are anything to go by, half the UK’s population don’t even know who he is. So this week he changed his approach to the annual party leader’s [...]
Current debates within the European socialist movement on the way forward for the Centre-Left, often seem to be centred on the unnecessarily narrow field of “state versus market”. Much of the debate revolves around questions of the “correct ratio” of state-to-market in the provision of public goods and services, with scant attention given to the [...]
In the past 30 years a great number of utilities in the developed world have been privatised. That trend seems likely to be reversed. Why? Because the ideology which drove the project—in particular, the notion that the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector—is collapsing. Effective public ownership is being reconsidered not [...]
Recent elections in France have given the Socialist Party control of both the executive and legislative branches. Good news? For those of us on the Left, definitely. A major step towards bringing about a socialist economic order in Europe? Hardly. In France we have a Socialist Party that does not advocate socialism. But it’s not [...]
Everyone is telling us that growth is the only way out of the debt and fiscal crisis. But the one thing on which the so-called experts cannot agree is where this growth is supposed to come from. Growth rates in the affluent industrial nations have been in more or less steady decline since the 1970s; [...]
As the Supreme Court shows every sign of throwing out “Obamacare” and leaving 30 million Americans without health insurance, another drama is being played out in the quiet corridors of the Federal Reserve system that may affect even more of us. Taxpayers will be on the hook for another giant Wall Street bailout, and the [...]
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