Ferraris for all

After a three week break I am getting back into blogging. Once I receive comments from my publisher I also will have to rewrite my book manuscript by the end of the month.

So far the links I have found are as follows. If you think I have missed anything particularly important while I have been away please email me.

* I was particularly said to miss this year’s Battle of Ideas festival in London. However, several sessions, including one on post-recession ideologies, are already available on audio. Others will hopefully soon follow on video. Rob Killick has also written up his speech on economic growth and its discontents.

* Worldwrite’s regular Worldbytes television magazine programme includes an item on austerity and the alleged lesions of the Second World War.

* Al Gore is in the news a lot with a new book coming out entitled Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. He is also the subject of the cover story in this week’s Newsweek while a New York Times article examines the possible conflict of interest between Gore as an investor and as an advocate for action on climate change.

* Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, made much of the battle against climate change in her address to the American congress.

* Meanwhile, the implication of this BBC article and the related radio programme is that nostalgia for East German values is a form that growth scepticism is taking in Germany. I am not sure this is correct but it is certainly worth investigating.

Labels: America, book, climate, environment, Germany, radio, television, Worldwrite

The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, published today in Britain by Allen Lane, looks set to become an influential addition to the enormous and dubious growth sceptic canon. The two authors are proving popular on the circuit for such things including appearances on the Moral Maze with me yesterday, Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Nightwaves on Radio 3 as well as a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts today. They were also reviewed in the Economist.

The authors present the book as a technical – that is non-political – book on the facts of social inequality. Their central thesis is that what matters in the developed economies is not poverty but inequality. Better to have more equal societies, such as Sweden or Japan, than highly unequal ones, such as America or Britain.

Judging by what I have heard and read so far, it has several weaknesses. These include:

• Lumping together disparate forms of data in dubious composite “indices”. As far as I can gather these include more subjective factors (such as “happiness”) with more objective ones (such as life expectancy).

• They miss the extent to which many factors, such as mental illness, are largely socially defined. So, for example, the definition of mental illness in many western societies have been substantially widened in recent years.

• They seem to rely on primate studies for at least part of their evidence in relation to status. In its review of the book the Economist moves shamelessly from talking about poor Indian children to discussing baboons in the course of one paragraph: “Low-caste Indian children do worse on cognitive tests if they must state their identities beforehand. High-status baboons bred in captivity show elevated levels of stress hormones and become ill more often when they are moved to groups where they no longer dominate.”

In any case they draw sweeping growth sceptic conclusions which are clearly political – despite their protestations – and not justified by the data. The Economist quotes the two authors as arguing that: “We have got close to the end of what economic growth can do for us.”

Much of my work is focused on refuting such ideas. For example, I argue that the challenge of climate change and an ageing population can only be met with substantially more resources – and that means economic growth. That is leaving aside the benefits to individuals being wealthier in the West and the still enormous challenge of development in the third world.

I have also argued the meaning of the demand for equality has been fundamentally transformed with the acceptance of the idea that there is no alternative to the market. It used to be a demand for more – for realising the human potential – whereas it is now typically a demand for less. I have written about this before in a 2006 article for spiked on Polly Toynbee (who has also just had a paperback edition of her latest book on “greed” in Britain published). However, I plan to extend the thesis considerably in my book.

Labels: affluenza, book, consumption, happiness, inequality, radio

I am on the BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze this evening discussing Fred Goodwin’s pay and “moral capitalism”. It should also be available on BBC iPlayer after the broadcast.

Labels: consumption, economics, ethics, media appearances, radio, work

I finally managed to track down the origin of the quote by Oliver James, the clinical psychologist who propagates the idea of “Affluenza”, where he says that: “I absolutely embrace the credit crunch with both arms”. It was in a BBC Radio 4 Book Club programme with James Naughtie that was first broadcast on 7 January. The audience was largely sympathetic to James while Naughtie seemed oblivious to the fact that the Affluenza thesis is not original.

The criticisms I made of the book in my review still remain valid (see the list of links on the left). An additional point that struck me was his insistence that people should watch much less television if they want to protect themselves against Affluenza.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, radio, television

The last programme in the series of the BBC Radio 4 Iconoclasts programme looked at the debate around third world sweatshops. Jagdish Bhagwati, a professor of economics at Columbia University, argued that sweatshops should not be criticised for paying poor wages although he conceded it was wrong to have poor working conditions. He emphasised that industrial exports could lead to growth which could in turn life countries out of poverty.

After an initial introduction by Bhagwati there was a debate involving Ceri Dingle of Worldwrite a campaigner from War on Want and the owner of a fair trade fashion label. The advocates of ethical consumption came out with the usual clichés: complaining about free market economics and trickle down theory (even though neither had been mentioned by Bhagwati or Dingle). They also focused on sweatshops in the poorer countries without understanding that the plight of those working on the land is generally worse. There were also complaints about inequality (but not arguing for more growth) and an implicit assumption that the British government could somehow help trade unions organising in poorer countries. Dingle ably put the case for more growth, greater industrialisation and higher expectations.

Labels: consumption, development, ethics, radio, trade, work, Worldwrite

This week’s BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme, presented by Frances Cairncross, included the most detailed popular discussion of geo-engineering I have come across so far. In broad terms three possible techniques were identified:

• Removing carbon dioxide from the oceans.
• Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
• Using lenses or mirrors to divert sunlight from the planet.

However, the discussion is still wracked with anxiety. On the one hand, some are arguing that things are getting so bad that geo-engineering might be necessary despite the possibility of damaging unintended consequences. On the other hand, others are worried that discussing geo-engineering could shift the discussion away from decarbonisation. An added worry seems to be that developing countries such as China and India – those that most need great increases in energy supply - could take a lead in developing the technology.

It is a pity there cannot be a more confident, forward-looking debate.

Labels: climate, environment, geo-engineering, radio, science

Nico Macdonald has provided a useful summary of a discussion on work-life balance on yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme:

"New research claims that it is getting harder to manage a work life balance." On need for more support for working couples with children, and for carers. Discussion with Jenny Watson, Chair Equal Opportunities Commission, and Mark Easton, home editor, BBC News. Easton: "There is a... more radical answer, which is that we could all do less... work less, commute less, move around less, Yes, we could earn a bit less... What the economists point out is that we can actually choose to work a three day week in this country, and we would _still_ have a standard of living far in excess of our grandparents... There are choices here we _do_ have... but are reluctant to take... Instead of spending more and more of our weekends in the office, so that we can pay for that giant mortgage and that new mobile phone, we could I suppose spend more time with our kids... The pressures in a society like ours to have the right stuff and to keep up with the Jones's... are very significant." Easton also celebrates Southern European extended families, which feature childcare by the 'younger old' and family care for the 'older old'."

Of course Easton is right to argue that individuals can make the choice of taking a cut in income in return for working fewer hours. But from a social perspective it is economic growth, and the accompanying rise in productivity, that has enabled a dramatic fall in working hours over the long-term.

Labels: radio, work

This morning I debated Oliver James, the author of a new book on “affluenza” on the Radio 4 Today programme (programme available on its website for the next seven days). His argument is that affluence is increasingly making us sick. Nico Macdonald has produced a summary of our debate which is available here. James has not put forward an original thesis - his book is the third with “affluenza” as a title - but two things were notable about what he said:

* His thesis takes the form of an attack on the rich. However, it is the poor who suffer as a result of attacks on affluence.

* He claimed that over the long-term working hours in America and Britain have lengthened. This is simply wrong. Long-term statistics on his this trend are tricky to interpret - for example, because of the rise of the number of women in the labour force - but there is no doubt the trend is for working hours to fall. Even apart from the working week people are spending more time in education and more time in retirement. The amount of back-breaking manual labour people have to do has fallen dramatically. Also, according to the latest figures from National Statistics, the average working week in Britain has fallen by one hour over the past 15 years. I intend to do more work on the subject of working hours in my book.

At lunchtime I had a rematch against Oliver James on the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2. A summary of the debate can be read here. James made much of the fact he was talking about mental illness rather than unhappiness. He did not see the bigger picture of how his arguments relate to growth scepticism.

Labels: affluenza, America, happiness, media appearances, radio, work

Last weekend I debated the Battle for Affluence at the Battle of Ideas festival. The thrust of my argument was that affluence has proved enormously beneficial for humanity and will continue to do so. In contrast others, such as Professor Avner Offer of Oxford university and Mark Easton of the BBC, argued that our preoccupation with prosperity has gone too far. In their view other factors, such as well-being, should be the main focus of government policy. Others on the panel included Professor Nicholas Crafts of Warwick university and Jenny Davey of the Times (London). Later that evening I also debated Professor Offer on BBC Radio Five Live.

At the conference I also chaired a session in which Damned by Debt Relief, a film made by Worldwrite, had its world premiere. The film showed how the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative imposes new conditions on the poor but does not offer any new money. A trailer for the film can be viewed here.

Other sessions at the weekend included a debate on the “happiness trap” and a series on the Battle over Nature.

Labels: affluenza, film, happiness, media appearances, radio, speeches, Worldwrite

I appeared today on the Counterpoint programme on ABC Radio National in Australia talking about Bono's Product RED initiative as well as related issues such as ethical consumption and economic development. You can listen by clicking here.

Labels: consumption, development, ethics, media appearances, radio

Today I debated consumer debt on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. The peg for the debate was a report from Datamonitor, a business research group, which estimated that the average British resident has £3,175 of unsecured borrowing. That is about twice the average in continental Europe.

I argued that debt was not a problem for most people as long as the economy was growing strongly and unemployment was low. In addition, much of the anti-debt campaign has a puritanical edge to it: a dislike for ordinary people buying luxury goods. However, this does not preclude a small minority having debt problems. Usually these are a result of changes in life circumstances such as divorce or unemployment.

My opponent was David Nellist, a former Labour MP. He presented debt as a huge problem for ordinary people; seduced by advertising and enticed by junk mail.

Labels: debt, media appearances, radio