Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
In a new research brief, the Center for American Progress analyzes the extent to which “austerity is hammering state economies.” The graph below shows how cuts in public spending have slowed private growth rates.
This sketch from Monty Python is a reminder that disagreements between Germany and Greece aren’t exactly new.
Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
Robert Skidelsky asks if insatiability has become a collective vice.
Aristotle knew of insatiability only as a personal vice; he had no inkling of the collective, politically orchestrated insatiability that we call economic growth. The civilization of “always more” would have struck him as moral and political madness.
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And, beyond a certain point, it is also economic madness. This is not just or mainly because we will soon enough run up against the natural limits to growth. It is because we cannot go on for much longer economizing on labor faster than we can find new uses for it. That road leads to a division of society into a minority of producers, professionals, supervisors, and financial speculators on one side, and a majority of drones and unemployables on the other.
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Apart from its moral implications, such a society would face a classic dilemma: how to reconcile the relentless pressure to consume with stagnant earnings. So far, the answer has been to borrow, leading to today’s massive debt overhangs in advanced economies. Obviously, this is unsustainable, and thus is no answer at all, for it implies periodic collapse of the wealth-producing machine.
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