http://audioboo.fm/boos/1298959-is-the-uk-too-posh-to-push-for-growth
Refreshing to hear Tony Greenham of the New Economic Foundation in this discussion on BBC Radio 4s Today programme this morning separaing out GDP growth from the growth we actually want. I wish he'd had more time. Mariana Mazzucato had the lion's share, it seemed to me, but spoke about standard economic stuff without challenging the assumption that increase in GDP is unequivocally good.
Tony pointed out that crime and the destruction of rainforests contribute to GDP, he opined. I would disagree with him that growth in jobs is desirable. It's interesting that he should have that in his list alongside sustainability and equality.
Showing posts with label bbc radio 4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bbc radio 4. Show all posts
Saturday, 30 March 2013
Tuesday, 5 March 2013
Killer jobs
I just listened to an item on BBC Radio 4s 'PM' programme about a polluted river in China. A campaigner had offered the equivalent of £10,000 to acertain politician to swim in it, so far with no response.
A correspondent interviewed a woman who had lived alongside the river for twenty years. When she first lived there the river water was drinkable and the fish it produced delicious, but with all the industries, now it is an ugly, stinking, carcinogenic environmental disaster. The campaigner in question believes his health is being adversely affected.
The piece ended with someone (a politician) saying that previous priority was jobs, but now environmental protection is a priority.
Be very afraid. Politicians fequently prioritise jobs and economic growth over the preservation of the finite biosphere that maintains our lives. Yes that's it, they considered it more important to create things for people to do than to preserve human life directly, and some of the things the people were doing wer actively destroying the environment, which sustains life. It is literally more important in the eyes of these deranged people to kill people and animals than to keep them alive if the former creates jobs.
A correspondent interviewed a woman who had lived alongside the river for twenty years. When she first lived there the river water was drinkable and the fish it produced delicious, but with all the industries, now it is an ugly, stinking, carcinogenic environmental disaster. The campaigner in question believes his health is being adversely affected.
The piece ended with someone (a politician) saying that previous priority was jobs, but now environmental protection is a priority.
Be very afraid. Politicians fequently prioritise jobs and economic growth over the preservation of the finite biosphere that maintains our lives. Yes that's it, they considered it more important to create things for people to do than to preserve human life directly, and some of the things the people were doing wer actively destroying the environment, which sustains life. It is literally more important in the eyes of these deranged people to kill people and animals than to keep them alive if the former creates jobs.
Monday, 2 July 2012
Gold standard lunatics
The episode of BBC Radio 4's Analysis programme which aired tonight at 1930 GMT had a scary false dichotomy between the gold standard and our current monetary supply system.
It is true that it doesn't make sense to have a money supply without a physical referent, but that doesn't make the gold standard any more logical. If money supply was related to the amount of gold that has been discovered, the absurd situation arises that discovering a quantity of a comparatively useless metal would increase the size of the economy, and once all gold has been discovered, the economy cannot grow.
Relating money supply to the price of gold is nonsensical, because the price of gold must be in units related to the price of gold (as money is on the gold standard). Or, if the price of gold could float freely, money supply would be related to a free floating variable.
In the gold standard, gold had to be shipped. Ridiculous. All this relatively useless stuff did was sit in vaults wile it wasn't being transferred betwwen them. No wonder governments realised it was utterly stupid, and sold the gold without admitting it.
But the gold standard proponents were right that money supply should not be unrestrained. It is a starting point to say that it should be related to the amount of goods and services being produced. The problem here is the problem of growth in GDP - the planet is finite so far as physical stuff goes, so insofar as it relates to stuff, money supply should not increase. Services are a different matter. Technology is a case in point. Microproccessor based technology is getting smaller as it gets more powerful. It sis clear that, over time, we can get more service per unit of stuff. If we could quantify service, we might have a guide to the quantity of money that there should be, but how do you compare a basic human need (nutrition, say) against a higher order need or service (finding out where the nearest restaurant is using your smart phone).
For me, human well-being is the key and for the moment, I'm thinking money supply should be a function of the number of people alive and their age. I'm sure this is less than perfect, but it is a starting point.
It is true that it doesn't make sense to have a money supply without a physical referent, but that doesn't make the gold standard any more logical. If money supply was related to the amount of gold that has been discovered, the absurd situation arises that discovering a quantity of a comparatively useless metal would increase the size of the economy, and once all gold has been discovered, the economy cannot grow.
Relating money supply to the price of gold is nonsensical, because the price of gold must be in units related to the price of gold (as money is on the gold standard). Or, if the price of gold could float freely, money supply would be related to a free floating variable.
In the gold standard, gold had to be shipped. Ridiculous. All this relatively useless stuff did was sit in vaults wile it wasn't being transferred betwwen them. No wonder governments realised it was utterly stupid, and sold the gold without admitting it.
But the gold standard proponents were right that money supply should not be unrestrained. It is a starting point to say that it should be related to the amount of goods and services being produced. The problem here is the problem of growth in GDP - the planet is finite so far as physical stuff goes, so insofar as it relates to stuff, money supply should not increase. Services are a different matter. Technology is a case in point. Microproccessor based technology is getting smaller as it gets more powerful. It sis clear that, over time, we can get more service per unit of stuff. If we could quantify service, we might have a guide to the quantity of money that there should be, but how do you compare a basic human need (nutrition, say) against a higher order need or service (finding out where the nearest restaurant is using your smart phone).
For me, human well-being is the key and for the moment, I'm thinking money supply should be a function of the number of people alive and their age. I'm sure this is less than perfect, but it is a starting point.
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
Ferguson and Natural Capitalism
Niall Ferguson's first 2012 Reith Lecture (broadcast on Radio 4 this morning, but to be aired again) was primarily about the role of institutions in economic life. He argues that Britain's erstwhile economic success was down to the quality and constitution of our institutions. In the Q&A session after his talk, he admits, though, though not in these words, that capitalism as we have it breaks its own rules as it liquidates [natural] capital and calls it income.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b01jmx0p
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b01jmx0p
Limits to growth
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9729000/9729574.stm
'Forty years ago, a self-appointed panel of experts called the Club of Rome published a tract entitled the Limits to Growth, a massively influential report that showed how exponential growth in population and resource use, in a world of finite resources, would end very badly.
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Sceptical Environmentalist, told the Today programme that the 1970s environmentalists were "spectacularly wrong" because they "fundamentally missed innovation".
"Technology can do amazing things," he said. "We have done a lot better than predicted".
"If we're going to tackle future problems such as global warming we need to focus on innovation," he believes.'
As presented here, Bjorn Lomborg's ideas are rather worrying. He is right that (some of) the specific predictions in The limits to growth were wrong and I accept that he is right that the authors underplayed the benefits of technology, but the undisputable fact is that there ARE limits to growth as resources ARE finite.
At the end of this short interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (link above) Lomborg says that the idea of telling people that they have to live with less is a hard sell. This is undoubtedly true, but by playing up the mistakes in specifics, and down the key point about finite resources, he makes it seem as if people shouldn't be told the unpalatable inevitable consequence of finite resources even if it is true.
What is living with less? Superficially it sounds like we're all to tighten our belts and live more frugally. That may be so, but one of the benefits of technology is that it aids the separation of services from goods/products, and enables us to get more service from the same physical resource. This is a key tenet of www.natcap.org / the book Natural Capitalism and www.collaborativeconsumption.org lists an increasing number of ways of arranging to derive service benefits from physical resources.
We win all round by doing this. The obvious example of taxis illustrates. The driver wants his/her taxi to be reliable, so it is in the manufacturer's interest to make it so. The taxi driver wants his/her taxi to be in use a high proportion of the time. This makes maximum benefit from the investment in the taxi, and also provides maximum capacity to the taxi network.
(The technology has not yet yielded up a unified booking system for private hire vehicles. In the main, they operate as separate companies. It should be possible to tell a system that I want to go from A to B, arriving/departing at time xx:xx and for the system to dispatch a vehicle appropriately for the job. The systems exist, but they ae not comprehensive and we still have to choose which company to contact.)
'Forty years ago, a self-appointed panel of experts called the Club of Rome published a tract entitled the Limits to Growth, a massively influential report that showed how exponential growth in population and resource use, in a world of finite resources, would end very badly.
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Sceptical Environmentalist, told the Today programme that the 1970s environmentalists were "spectacularly wrong" because they "fundamentally missed innovation".
"Technology can do amazing things," he said. "We have done a lot better than predicted".
"If we're going to tackle future problems such as global warming we need to focus on innovation," he believes.'
As presented here, Bjorn Lomborg's ideas are rather worrying. He is right that (some of) the specific predictions in The limits to growth were wrong and I accept that he is right that the authors underplayed the benefits of technology, but the undisputable fact is that there ARE limits to growth as resources ARE finite.
At the end of this short interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (link above) Lomborg says that the idea of telling people that they have to live with less is a hard sell. This is undoubtedly true, but by playing up the mistakes in specifics, and down the key point about finite resources, he makes it seem as if people shouldn't be told the unpalatable inevitable consequence of finite resources even if it is true.
What is living with less? Superficially it sounds like we're all to tighten our belts and live more frugally. That may be so, but one of the benefits of technology is that it aids the separation of services from goods/products, and enables us to get more service from the same physical resource. This is a key tenet of www.natcap.org / the book Natural Capitalism and www.collaborativeconsumption.org lists an increasing number of ways of arranging to derive service benefits from physical resources.
We win all round by doing this. The obvious example of taxis illustrates. The driver wants his/her taxi to be reliable, so it is in the manufacturer's interest to make it so. The taxi driver wants his/her taxi to be in use a high proportion of the time. This makes maximum benefit from the investment in the taxi, and also provides maximum capacity to the taxi network.
(The technology has not yet yielded up a unified booking system for private hire vehicles. In the main, they operate as separate companies. It should be possible to tell a system that I want to go from A to B, arriving/departing at time xx:xx and for the system to dispatch a vehicle appropriately for the job. The systems exist, but they ae not comprehensive and we still have to choose which company to contact.)
Monday, 21 May 2012
Critique of current economics by economists
BBC Radio 4's 'Start the week' programme today featured a very temperate debate on 'Money & Morality' between Michael Sandel, Diane Coyle and Grigory Yavlinsky.
Although it did dig into ecomomics, it only (in my view) got as far as society in the abstract, and didn't really get at the concept of the human/biological needs that the economy truly needs to fulfil.
Towards the end of what (in their defence) was only a 28 minute long programme, Coyle gave an opinion with which I strongly disagree. "We need growth ... because it brings jobs." I won't restate here wy I disagree with that, but I will try to contact Coyle to tell her why I think she is wrong to say that.
Although it did dig into ecomomics, it only (in my view) got as far as society in the abstract, and didn't really get at the concept of the human/biological needs that the economy truly needs to fulfil.
Towards the end of what (in their defence) was only a 28 minute long programme, Coyle gave an opinion with which I strongly disagree. "We need growth ... because it brings jobs." I won't restate here wy I disagree with that, but I will try to contact Coyle to tell her why I think she is wrong to say that.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Proper economics
After listening to some standard economic blather abiut how we need to increase spending and how we need people to do low paid jobs on radio 4's Today programme this morning, my ears pricked up at an item (at 07:49) based on the Royal Society's new People and the planet report.
"The BBC's listen again page says "The Today programme's Tom Feilden reports on the challenge population growth represents and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir John Sulston outlines the Royal Society's is major new report,"and Sarah Montague seemed to want to focus onthe issue of trying to reduce population growth, but Sulston was prepared to consider allowing population to grow naturally and criticised our obsession with growth in GDP - which as he pointed out is an attempt to consume more faster when in fact we have a finite amount of resources.
"The BBC's listen again page says "The Today programme's Tom Feilden reports on the challenge population growth represents and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir John Sulston outlines the Royal Society's is major new report,"and Sarah Montague seemed to want to focus onthe issue of trying to reduce population growth, but Sulston was prepared to consider allowing population to grow naturally and criticised our obsession with growth in GDP - which as he pointed out is an attempt to consume more faster when in fact we have a finite amount of resources.
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Restorative Justice
The report about the riots in England last summer was out today (28 March 2012). From my fairly bried skim through it I can see that it favours restorative justice strongly. I was reminded of a recent item on BBC Radio 4, probably last week, in which meetings had been set up between the parents of someone who had been brutally murdered in the street for no apparent reason, and the perpetrators of another, I believe violent crime (meeting the actual people who had killed their son would be unbearable, and I assume this is the reason it wasn't done that way). What really struck me was how the perpetrators used expressed in their own words how they hadn't really previously considered what the loved ones of their victims might feel as a result of their activities. This is what seems 'restorative' for the perpetrators, who in so many cases 'see' and reform their lives - and of course don't re-offend. For the victims or their loved ones, what's restorative is to see that change happen. Something good has come out of the dreadful actions and consequences.
The background and early life of those who commit crimes are often harrowing to hear of. They haven't been raised in a supportive and loving home, and have often been victims of something much worse than neglect. Perhaps even their parents had an upbringing like this, and are passing on what they know. Violence begets violence. The challenge for society is to break the chain of bad upbringing - and one way of helping might be using some of the techniques of restorative justice. Maybe a young person on a trajectory towards violence, if shown (for example) the restorative justice process I described above (featured on BBC Radio 4) , would be convinced not to continue on that trajectory. A tragedy could thus perhaps be avoided by the restorative's application prior to the need for any justice.
On the front of the London Metro free newspaper today, someone was opining that there's not enough deterrent in the likelihood and severity of prison sentences. Maybe people who were brought up in harsh or even violent homes will fear more of the same in prison, and restrain themselves. I don't know, but I'm not sure fear is what we really want to tap into - not ideally, anyway. The problem of the prison regime though, is for those who go through it. They've maybe started life in a harsh environment of punishment. They've committed a crime, and they're consequently subjected to another harsh regime of punishment. It's all they know. And not only does prison continue the harsh regime of their childhood, it mixes them with hardened re-offenders and gives them the opportunity to study in an academy of crime with the experts.
So, we can look at what happened to offenders before their offence, and make sure that the same thing is not happening to children and young people now. The prevention of re-offending is wise, but if the techniques used on offenders were used on pre-offenders, wow many offences might be prevented?
The riot report says that 50% of the crimes committed in the riots were acquisitive (looting, theft and robbery) and also comments on deprivation. Unfortunately it doesn't hit on the concept of inequality that is used in the book The Spirit Level, and shown to be a good predictor of social ills. Deprivation must be a key feature of those homes where children are badly brought up. Tackle that, and your dealing upstream with violence and rioting, which can only be logical as well as good.
The background and early life of those who commit crimes are often harrowing to hear of. They haven't been raised in a supportive and loving home, and have often been victims of something much worse than neglect. Perhaps even their parents had an upbringing like this, and are passing on what they know. Violence begets violence. The challenge for society is to break the chain of bad upbringing - and one way of helping might be using some of the techniques of restorative justice. Maybe a young person on a trajectory towards violence, if shown (for example) the restorative justice process I described above (featured on BBC Radio 4) , would be convinced not to continue on that trajectory. A tragedy could thus perhaps be avoided by the restorative's application prior to the need for any justice.
On the front of the London Metro free newspaper today, someone was opining that there's not enough deterrent in the likelihood and severity of prison sentences. Maybe people who were brought up in harsh or even violent homes will fear more of the same in prison, and restrain themselves. I don't know, but I'm not sure fear is what we really want to tap into - not ideally, anyway. The problem of the prison regime though, is for those who go through it. They've maybe started life in a harsh environment of punishment. They've committed a crime, and they're consequently subjected to another harsh regime of punishment. It's all they know. And not only does prison continue the harsh regime of their childhood, it mixes them with hardened re-offenders and gives them the opportunity to study in an academy of crime with the experts.
So, we can look at what happened to offenders before their offence, and make sure that the same thing is not happening to children and young people now. The prevention of re-offending is wise, but if the techniques used on offenders were used on pre-offenders, wow many offences might be prevented?
The riot report says that 50% of the crimes committed in the riots were acquisitive (looting, theft and robbery) and also comments on deprivation. Unfortunately it doesn't hit on the concept of inequality that is used in the book The Spirit Level, and shown to be a good predictor of social ills. Deprivation must be a key feature of those homes where children are badly brought up. Tackle that, and your dealing upstream with violence and rioting, which can only be logical as well as good.
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