Let’s start with an addled view of what it is to be human. According to economists, it is the ability to calculate. Their picture of the human is that of homo economicus ‘economic man’, a calculating machine who is always weighing up the costs and benefits of every course of action. Economics is about ‘economizing’ … Continue reading What Makes Us Human?

George Osborne is bound to crow at the Conservative party conference about the superior performance of the British economy under his stewardship. After three years of “hard slog”, there is at last some good news to report. In the second quarter of this year, the economy grew by 0.7 per cent after “flatlining” for the … Continue reading Osborne may gloat about recovery, but his “hard slog” will leave Britain worse off

By Robert Skidelsky and Nan Craig Britain is a service economy with a lot of lousy services. The paradox is easily explainable. Service and cost-cutting are contradictions in terms. Good services are intrinsically expensive because they require a high ratio of labour to product; hence the old view that services could not be automated. Yet … Continue reading Why does our service economy offer such bad service?

Co-authored with Marcus Miller Across Europe, austerity policies have caused stagnation and despair. There is a more humane way to restore our fortunes. Lionel Robbins defined economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources among competing uses. For an economy at full employment, where the opportunity cost of government spending is the private … Continue reading The economics of despair

Vince Cable has responded to Robert Skidelsky's September 2012 article on the economy, 'Go left, go right… go downhill'. You can read Cable's article here at the New Statesman website: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/03/when-facts-change-should-i-change-my-mind And Robert Skidelsky's original piece, here: http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/article/go-left-go-right-go-downhill/  

In the early 1950s, Britain was an industrial giant. Today it is an industrial pygmy. Manufacturing was industry’s bedrock. In 1952 it produced a third of national output, employed 40% of the workforce, and made up a quarter of world manufacturing exports. Today manufacturing is just 12% of GDP, employs only 8% of the workforce, … Continue reading Meeting our Makers

Refreshed by his summer holiday, David Cam­eron vowed to “get Britain moving again”. A slew of kick-starting initiatives has followed, most of them the brainchild of his government’s one-man think tank, Vince Cable. The figures are dire. After a tepid recovery from the collapse of 2008, the British economy has started shrinking again. Most forecasters … Continue reading Go left, go right… go downhill

Since its collapse in the autumn of 2008, the world economy has gone through three phases: a year or more of rapid decline; a bounce back in 2009-2010, which nevertheless did not amount to a full recovery; and a second, though so far much shallower, downturn this year. The resulting damage over the past four … Continue reading Coordination vs Disintegration

Alistair Darling's story of his time as Gordon Brown's Chancellor of the Exchequer is intriguingly titled Back from the Brink. There are many brinks in this book - the near-collapse of the British banking system and the world economy, for one. The relationship between Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, and Callum McCarthy, … Continue reading Back from the Brink by Alistair Darling

The ideas of two dead economists, David Ricardo and J M Keynes, are shaping the cuts debate. The coalition is in thrall to the former’s small-government agenda and says there is no alternative – but its plans aren’t working. The course of deficit cutting has been set in stone and few expected that the Budget, … Continue reading The Osborne Ultimatum