I agree Porridge. It’s a pity Sunak, like Truss, can’t just stand there, know and say from his heart his own words. Reading a script slowly with weird gaps is amateurish.
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His what and his what? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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On a similar subject, it appeared to me that Nicola Sturgeon’s very long speech a week or so ago was made without a teleprompter or notes. She never looked down and swept her gaze throughout the audience constantly. I was very impressed by both that and the content, and I don’t think I have ever in my life watched and listened to a politician for over an hour.
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I was actually being sarcastic, I thought it was the perfect opportunity for him to put his hand in his magicians hat 
and magic up all the benefits he claimed there would be following Brexit.
I’m very sad to admit you have a point
“…wealthier people are more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior.”
Though not the late, great Anthony Wedgewood Benn. As he once said: “My contribution to the Labour party is that I know the British establishment inside out and what they’re up to.”
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Article on his latest book here.
So refreshing to read an economist that actually has a realistic grasp of history and politics !
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“…you cannot just sit and say: ‘Societies evolve in the right direction.’ You have to fight for them, too.”
Quite
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Thank you: I enjoyed that article.
But it made me wonder what process reduced economics to such a pale reflection of what it might have been. What caused the phenomenon he summarises thus:
“Up to the 1970s, economics was populated by a diverse range of ‘schools’ containing different visions and research methodologies – classical, Marxist, neoclassical, Keynesian, developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, institutionalist and behaviouralist, to name only the most significant. Since the 1980s, economics has become the British food scene before the 1990s. One tradition – neoclassical economics – has become the only item on the menu. Like all other schools, it has its strengths; it also has serious limitations.”?
I presume this impoverishment of ideas must be the “fault” of economics teachers in universities (unless anyone has an alternative explanation), but why would they do that?
In his attack on his own profession soon after the 2008 financial crash (which neo-classical economists notoriously failed to either predict or explain) Chang made a case that economics as it evolved since the 1980s was not even a legitimate university subject - it had no coherent epistemolgy, methodology, etc. He advocated abolishing it in favour of the older ‘political economy’ approach, which explicitly acknowledged that the underlying assumptions of different ways of looking at the economy are in fact political.
As to why economics went astray, that’s easy: money.
Just as wealthy corporations and individuals established an eco-system of ‘think-tanks’, journals, etc, to promote ‘free-market’ ideology, so they funded research, posts, institutes, etc, at universities, especially in the US. This favoured not only staff with certain political preferences, but the mathematical model approach - the two went together because the modellers tended to work from supposedly rational self-interested behaviour (an oddly irrational assumption!). The prestige in some of these universities of ‘hard’ science like physics also fed into this - an aspiration to make economics like that: mathematical, a-political, etc - removed from politics and values. And the parallel development of computing power also played its part.
Of course there were always dissenters, especially in Europe - but in the anglosphere the modellers had become very dominant before the 2008 crash. Then it all fell apart. In the aftermath of the crash students and researchers rebelled: if the models they were spending all their time studying and developing couldn’t even predict such a melt-down, what was their point? The other major factor was Japan’s QE strategy. In the aftermath of the crash economic historians like Chang and Piketty started pointing out other failures of the modellers - like the fact that Japan had been ‘printing money’ for the last decade and it had not produced any inflation - indeed, rather the opposite. Now that, like the crash (according to the models) just should not have happened!
In short, it’s now the political economists and economic historians that are again in the ascendant - the study of what has actually taken place in the real world. Not that the mathematical modellers and their dominant ideology have disappeared - as the recent UK dalliance with ‘trickle-down’ demonstrated - and as I suppose Sunak will continue to demon-strate.
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There’s also a brief extract from Chang’s new book in the Observer today (haven’t read it myself yet - I’ve no doubt one of my children will buy it for me for Xmas…)
Good article by John Harris in today’s Observer on the lamentable state of UK railways - but with much wider implications:
The recent history of Britain’s trains is much the same as that of the country itself: a hare-brained plunge into privatisation and crony capitalism, followed by endless underinvestment, chronic short-termism and that achingly familiar approach to industrial relations that regards partnership and consensus as suited only to wimps. Worse still, as with so many of the constituent parts of everyday British life, the pandemic delivered a shock from which the system shows no signs of any convincing recovery. The World Economic Forum now places the UK 29th in its global rankings for the quality of its railways, in between Kazakhstan and India. Compared with the rest of western Europe, what we now have to put up with is not just unacceptable. It is not normal.
I was particularly struck by this as I’ve just this minute come back from putting my daughter on the train from Saint-Brieuc in the north-west of France to Strasbourg in the north-east - a journey of nearly a thousand kilometers (625 miles), on superb high-speed trains, for less than 70€ (£60).
I parked free at the station and left my car on charge (there are always spaces, and you can stay as long as you like).
Oh - and she was going back to uni, where her tuition is free, and her living expenses have been almost entirely met by government grants for the last 3 years.
If France can do this, why can’t the UK?
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I think as you have said elsewhere the Brits have embraced the American model. I’m thinking of HE not sure what the trains are like in the states.
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Parking at Brest , Niort ,Avignon or Marseille aren’t free
For electric? The norm here (and as far as Nantes at least) is that you pay for the charge and park free (as at Saint-Brieuc station), or pay to park but charge free (as at Rennes, Nantes, etc) - either way, the parking is in effect free.
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Not for real cars 
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Bergerac station: free parking but the feral cats will perfume your vehicle.
Bordeaux station: an arm and a leg and both kidneys won’t cover it😉
I don’t know anything about American railways either - but the whole privatisation mess was of course based on the mistaken idea that ‘the market’ is always better than state provision - very consistent with the US free-market-free-for-all approach as opposed to the European Social Model (ie. free enterprise, but within a broadly socialist framework).
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Ah - a fossil-fuel dinosaur !
Because a political choice was made to not do so.
Partly in response, it has to be said, to the idea that everybody had to have a tertiary education which we simply could not afford. The goal was laudable in itself, but pursued for the wrong reasons.