It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
As Denis Healy, said when you are in a hole the first thing you should do is stop digging but in for a penny....
Why has what Richard and that excellent article about the Simpsons describe happened and is there anything we can do about it?
The key for me is value added. Back in the day when labour was the largest element of a car manufacturer's costs and a lot of the work was done by skilled and semi skilled manual labour they added a lot, possibly most, of the value to the vehicle. As the mechanisation became more sophisticated many of these skilled jobs became semi skilled or simply disappeared altogether.
When communication was difficult, expensive and unreliable there was no choice in a services industry but to employ the local talent, even if there were other opportunities for that talent that drove the price they were able to charge. If everyone was doing the same these costs could be passed on to the customer creating a virtuous circle by which such well paid workers created demand for many other products creating yet more jobs.
What we have seen with globalisation is that those who have rare skills can operate in a larger market than before and demand an even higher premium on their services. But those who don't find themselves competing with those who can afford to live on substantially less because those around them charge a lot less for their ancillary services.
Furthermore, as the service industry is internationalised more and more of the money bleeds out of the local economy into other economies further away draining the demand for other services and goods.
At the moment those in the west who are not able to claim a premium still do pretty well. They do well because they live in economies that generate value and a reasonable chunk of that value comes down the foodchain. They also have the benefit of a society where most are reasonably educated and where there is a lot of inherited capital in terms of infrastructure which boosts the standard of living of the occupants. They do less well than they did and they do better than they are going to do as the capital stored in these wealthier countries is depleted.
In the 19th century for us and in the 20th century for the US free trade worked really well because the productivity of our and then their employees was so high that international competition stood little chance. Now we are the ones struggling to work out how people compete with the China's and India's and free trade is not working so well for a significant part of our society, even as the better skilled or talented make more money than ever from this phenomenon. As a result our societies become more divided, less equal and more alienated from each other.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
I am not sure what the answer is. Obviously, for a whole host of reasons attached to my wider Libertarian views, I don't necessarily regard the Government as being the best organisation to deal with these things. Indeed the case of the super rich like Gates, Musk and perhaps Bezos is a case in point. They have made their money primarily from the Middle Classes. They have also got enough of a social conscience to realise that that money needs to be put to good use for mankind. So we have Gates spending vast amounts on solving third world medical problems and Musk looking out to the stars and a future for mankind on other worlds. No one would claim they are being greedy or evil in what they are doing but they are arguably acting like proxy Governments taxing the US Middle Classes to redistribute the wealth to areas they think are of benefit to mankind. Is this the right way to do things? I would suggest that is debatable.
What odds on Trump breaking with the GOP and setting up a 'Patriot Party' or similar?
My gut says he won't want anything so formal. Why create your own when you can still piggyback on an existing one, which has many people in it loyal to him already, who despite that might not leave to join him?
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Germany has a large rental sector. This is sometimes given as a reason for its economic performance as workers can move more easily.
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
I'm not known for defending Johnson, who is woefully unfit for PM, but in this case I would doubt any leading politician would not be "intrigued" as to what Trump was doing and how he was doing it.
Yep. It very much would depend on which lessons he learns from him.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
That tweet or whatever we call something on Parler just screams Phishing approach to get loads of people to incriminate themselves. But the morons will still jump right in.
That tweet or whatever we call something on Parler just screams Phishing approach to get loads of people to incriminate themselves. But the morons will still jump right in.
I thought that was the joke
Who knows....joke, phishing attempt, the world is mental.
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Germany in particular? Well, there was this one guy.... not a period that they'd like to repeat I suspect.
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Germany in particular? Well, there was this one guy.... not a period that they'd like to repeat I suspect.
And Switzerland.
Even the Dutch and Scandos rent far more than the US and have far great immigration ?
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Alternatively the German system keeps a party in power despite them losing 8pp. I suspect a lot of Germans want change, they’re just split as to what they want that change to be. This year’s election will be very interesting.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Germany has a large rental sector. This is sometimes given as a reason for its economic performance as workers can move more easily.
Germany also has a larger skilled manufacturing sector than we have however and higher gdp per capita.
52% of Germans now own their own home too, not much below the 63% in the UK who own their own home
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Actually most Germans do now own property.
As for immigration the AfD is on 8-11% in the latest polls and for the first time since WW2 there is a party with representation in the Bundestag that is right of the CDU/CSU
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Germany in particular? Well, there was this one guy.... not a period that they'd like to repeat I suspect.
And Switzerland.
Even the Dutch and Scandos rent far more than the US and have far great immigration ?
Possibly the rental market contains properties of good quality and is more secure in those countries.
Not something that can be said of all rental property in Britain, especially for the young.
I note Trunp's permanent suspension from Twitter has led a number of his supporters to end their Twitter accounts and go over to Parler.
This is a depressing and predictable sequence of events and is part of the deterioration of the political debate both in the United States and (mercifully not yet to the same extent) here.
The problem with Freedom of Speech isn't the freedom but the speech - that's a tad trite so I'll explain. Political debate should be about a plurality of views meeting in the virtual marketplace of ideas (sites like PB for example) where all views are heard but that requires those who posit opinions (on all sides and none) to be able to accept two principals - one that they may sometimes be wrong and two that sometimes their opponents may be right.
Without that basic concession, Freedom of Speech means nothing because all that happens is the equivalent of baseline tennis - each side hammers its opinion against the other. Sites become echo chambers where a majority viewpoint holds sway and dissenting views are chased out by repetition or frequency of objection. Going from Twitter to Parler makes the latter the new "home" for conservative debate but what's the point of conservatives, socialists, liberals, anarchists or whoever just debating with like-minded people?
"People like People like Themselves" and while the Internet and forums like this expose different viewpoints, they can become uncomfortable for those whose viewpoint doesn't fit "the majority".
Wow. I can’t remember the last time I read a thread header which made such an important point with such clarity. Well done Richard, a really excellent piece.
I can. It was yesterday's by @david_herdson. Today's is of the same high standard, as have been many of the recent headers. Well done all!
It was a good piece too although it seemed to boil down to Trump is not the messiah, he is a very naughty boy. Which we kinda know.
Yet non eu bands small and large have been able to tour in the uk with no problems over the years without free movement sounds like luvvie whinging to me
Richard, think you are spot on re: the economic roots of Trumpskyism. "The voice of the people is the will of God." So did Alcuin advise Charlemagne, and it remains true today.
At least in this sense: when millions of people have genuine economic grievances, that are hold them, their children and communities back, or worse pushing them back, it is the clear duty AND self-interest of the state, the political system, the politicos AND citizen, to listen well, think hard and work to change things for the better.
The rise of Trumpskyism in our times, reminds me a lot of the rise of Populism in the 1890s which was also characterized by extreme angst, anger and agitation within the existing political system, but in direct conflict with the political establishment of BOTH major parties.
And while the Populist Party came to being, the REAL action was within the Democrats and Republicans. Most of the Dems ended up allied in 1896 with the Pops, though a powerful minority did not, including incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland. On the other hand, most Republicans opposed populism, either as a 3rd party OR within the GOP. The main fault line being Bimetalism = using both gold AND silver for US coins & currency, an inflationary policy (when money supply was VERY limited) supported by most farmers (and silver miners) but opposed by Wall Street, "Main Street" and manufacturers (and their workers).
It was the Bimetalism issue that propelled young Williams Jennings Bryan to the Democratic (and Populist) Party nomination in 1896, following his electrifying "Cross of Gold" speech to the Dem convention. WJB then criss-crossed America addressing record-setting crowds from coast to coast, while his Republican rival, William McKinley waged a classic "front porch" campaign. The result: McKinley won a decisive victory in 1896, and was re-elected in 1900, again running against Bryan. Who waged one more losing presidential campaign, in 1908 against Taft.
Bryan remained THE key figure in the Democratic Party from 1896 to 1912, an eloquent & persistent spokesman for rural America, it's interests and values, at a time when a once-rural, agricultural nation was fast becoming an urban, industrial powerhouse. Which is one reason why WJB split his party, because he had much less appeal to big-city workers and immigrants who were the heart of the urban Democratic Party.
In 1912, Bryan swung his support behind Woodrow Wilson because WW was a progressive, and WW when on to win the Presidency thanks to the split in the GOP between Taft and TR. Also, Wilson appealed to both rural Southerners AND many urban progressives (even if he's was not first choice of Tammany Hall and the like).
BUT it was not until the Great Depression AND the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, that Democrats found a leader who could unite most rural & urban Americans, most liberals & moderates and even some conservatives (esp. in South) into a lasting coalition.
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Germany in particular? Well, there was this one guy.... not a period that they'd like to repeat I suspect.
And Switzerland.
Even the Dutch and Scandos rent far more than the US and have far great immigration ?
Not true as far as the Dutch and Finns and Norwegians are concerned, 69% of Dutch own their own home as do 71% of Finns and 81% of Norwegians compared to just 65% of Americans. Even the Swedes are only just below the Americans on 64% being home owners as are the Danes on 61% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
I linked the article about tesco's being taken to court by Levi's when I originally posted about it. Tesco's was told they weren't allowed to source levi jeans from outside of the eu.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
I think we need to massively promote FE colleges as an alternative to Universities, and a good route to future employment. I would call these elite FE colleges 'The Ivy League' (obviously borrowing from the US - I know that over there the term refers to their Oxbridge type Universities), and I would envisage a big sporting side, and even preppy uniforms (blazers and slacks) just to emphasise the difference. I think a lot of kids would like this.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Germany in particular? Well, there was this one guy.... not a period that they'd like to repeat I suspect.
And Switzerland.
Even the Dutch and Scandos rent far more than the US and have far great immigration ?
Not true as far as the Dutch and Finns and Norwegians are concerned, 69% of Dutch own their own home as do 71% of Finns and 81% of Norwegians compared to just 65% of Americans. Even the Swedes are only just below the Americans on 64% being home owners as are the Danes on 61% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
Switzerland is largely a tax haven
Denmark is well below the US for home ownership based on your link.
Kind of suggests your original idea that home ownership was massively important is not always the case.
Maybe there are other things at play to make people feel dislocated from society.
Yet non eu bands small and large have been able to tour in the uk with no problems over the years without free movement sounds like luvvie whinging to me
I suspect non-eu bands have been touring, but I bet they had to do the paperwork and permits first.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
I linked the article about tesco's being taken to court by Levi's when I originally posted about it. Tesco's was told they weren't allowed to source levi jeans from outside of the eu.
That wasn't about buying jeans, though, that was about buying branded consumer goods, and selling them as that brand.
Tesco could happily buy jeans, call them Tesco's Own Brand and sell them.
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
The arts are one sector where arguably Britain has a competitive advantage and much to offer. I'm not thinking just of the famous artists but all the many skills and trades that go into it. Silly to throw that away.
Arguably a lot of data processing, engineering and computing jobs will be done by robots. Train people for those sorts of jobs and it might end up being the equivalent of training people to work in Manchester mills just as those industries were moving to the Third World.
Agree with your general points though. I think we also need to be a lot less snobbish about some jobs. The key workers this last year have been people doing jobs that in other times a lot of people have disregarded and underpaid and have not wanted for their own children.
Yet non eu bands small and large have been able to tour in the uk with no problems over the years without free movement sounds like luvvie whinging to me
This is not about US bands touring the UK
This is about UK musicians like Opera North touring the EU.
In exchange for visa-free access to Britain for European performers.
In that case, why didn't they accept the UK offer? It's all part of the negotiation, nothing is for free.
The story is the UK turned it down, and the reason given is the UK did not want to grant reciprocal rights to EU performers.
This is from the EU source? That doesn't seem consistent with the UK making proposals for fewer restrictions in this area. The conditions are probably what killed it, or what it was being negotiated for.
The arts are one sector where arguably Britain has a competitive advantage and much to offer. I'm not thinking just of the famous artists but all the many skills and trades that go into it. Silly to throw that away.
And this is a good illustration of loss of market.
Previously UK musicians could play anywhere in Europe without a visa.
Now they are restricted to the UK only.
"But they could tour Australia" will whine the Brexiteers.
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Germany in particular? Well, there was this one guy.... not a period that they'd like to repeat I suspect.
And Switzerland.
Even the Dutch and Scandos rent far more than the US and have far great immigration ?
Not true as far as the Dutch and Finns and Norwegians are concerned, 69% of Dutch own their own home as do 71% of Finns and 81% of Norwegians compared to just 65% of Americans. Even the Swedes are only just below the Americans on 64% being home owners as are the Danes on 61% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
Switzerland is largely a tax haven
Denmark is well below the US for home ownership based on your link.
Kind of suggests your original idea that home ownership was massively important is not always the case.
Maybe there are other things at play to make people feel dislocated from society.
It does actually as Denmark leans left as does Sweden, the Netherlands however has a higher rate of home ownership and a centre right government as does Norway. So low rates of home ownership tend to favour the left, higher rates of home ownership tend to favour the centre right.
Populist rightwing nationalism is more to do with rising rates of immigration than home ownership however, hence the Netherlands via the PVV, Sweden via the Swedish Democrats, Finland via the True Finns, Germany via the AfD and Denmark via the Danish Peoples' Party all have establised populist right parties represented in their Parliaments now
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
I linked the article about tesco's being taken to court by Levi's when I originally posted about it. Tesco's was told they weren't allowed to source levi jeans from outside of the eu.
That wasn't about buying jeans, though, that was about buying branded consumer goods, and selling them as that brand.
Tesco could happily buy jeans, call them Tesco's Own Brand and sell them.
Why should it matter, they are levi jeans whether bought in poland or the usa . They were made by levi's to levi's patterns and branded as Levi's. Why should tesco not be therefore allowed to sell them as Levi's. It isn't like they are counterfeit.
The fact is purely Levi's trying to protect their excess profits.
Frankly if a company outsources its production then it should have absolutely no protection against retailers outsourcing their wholesale supplier. That is just trying to have your cake and eat it
While William Jennings Bryan NEVER attempted to overthrow the Constitution, and indeed conceded (if not happily) THREE presidential election loses (a record for an actual nominee) there are a number of similarities between WSJ and DJT
> both excellent orators whose style and substance was WAY more appreciated by the unwashed masses of roll-over / fly-over country, than by the urban sophisticates of New York, Boston and Emporia, Kansas.
> both advocated major reforms of established economic and political systems and policies, naturally opposed by the establishment (except those who saw ways to profit from populism).
> both engendered strong personal loyalty from the followers, and fear & loathing from opponents
> both entertained strong personal beliefs appealing to their base but offputing to others (such as anti-evolutionism for Bryan)
> both began their political careers in one state (Nebraska for Bryan, New York for Trumpsky) but ended up moving to Florida
> both in their own unique ways were fashion trend-setters (Bryan the Palm Beach suit, Trumpsky the MAGA hat)
> both engaged in rather dubious property dealings (WJB in Florida real estate boom, DJT too many to mention)
It is a good header @Richard_Tyndall and I think the issues raised are probably as significant for Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France. The comfortable life for the middle class in the developed world is slipping away, as countries that we once felt effortless superiority over catch up.
Indeed we are approaching a world where the middle class everywhere lives similarly, and the working classes too. For many in the West that is a levelling down. I think though that Trump has just conned them, there was neither a real plan to reverse the situation or even real intent to do so. That was the real con, "Make America Great Again" implies a return to the economic world order of the 1950s, and that is just a fraud. It isn't going to happen.
The root cause of the malaise is that profit accumulates to capital, rather than labour. To shareholders and the 1% ers rather than the workers. That process is accelerating too, as we see in this story of Middle American folk. Capitalism is not going to cure its own ills.
To some extent yes but even by 2050 it will still be better to live in the West than the developing world.
PWC for example forecasts that in 2050 US gdp per capita will be $87 700, UK gdp per capita will be $71 200, Chinese gdp per capita will be $43 400, Brazilian gdp per capita will be $31,600, Indian gdp per capita will be $25 900 and Nigerian gdp per capita will be $10 900.
GDP per capita is fine but can mislead. Elon Musk's share of American GDP would pay for quite a few MAGAs from Hicksville. It is a good ball park measure of countries' relative prosperity but not all wealth is equally divided or, for that matter, productively spent.
I think that a significant cause of the middle class malaise in America. The rewards to capital accrue great wealth to those with assets, while wages stagnate or deteriorate.
Just look at Bezos. A good service for consumers, but at the price of minimum wages and minimal job security, great and increasing wealth, and very little tax paid for amelioration his workers hardships.
Amazon is the new world economy in a nutshell. Much like the pre revolutionary France, where the nobility were exempt from taxes and the law, at least until the sans culottes decided to sort things out a different way.
The key is home ownership, as long as most of the middle and working class own a home then they will still have a big asset and stake in the capitalist economy.
If however we ever get to a situation where most are renting, combined with insufficient immigration controls, then populist politics of both the nationalist right and the socialist left will become not just the occasional exception as now but the norm
Why is the US mentality so different to those in say Germany?
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
Germany in particular? Well, there was this one guy.... not a period that they'd like to repeat I suspect.
And Switzerland.
Even the Dutch and Scandos rent far more than the US and have far great immigration ?
Possibly the rental market contains properties of good quality and is more secure in those countries.
Not something that can be said of all rental property in Britain, especially for the young.
I notified my landlord's letting agent on Thursday that it was no longer possible to lock our front door. They said that their maintenance contractor would contact us about visiting to fix this. I have since heard nothing.
It sort of doesn't matter at the moment, because we're staying at home anyway, but it can be hard for homeowners to realise quite how crap renting is in the UK.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
I am not sure what the answer is. Obviously, for a whole host of reasons attached to my wider Libertarian views, I don't necessarily regard the Government as being the best organisation to deal with these things. Indeed the case of the super rich like Gates, Musk and perhaps Bezos is a case in point. They have made their money primarily from the Middle Classes. They have also got enough of a social conscience to realise that that money needs to be put to good use for mankind. So we have Gates spending vast amounts on solving third world medical problems and Musk looking out to the stars and a future for mankind on other worlds. No one would claim they are being greedy or evil in what they are doing but they are arguably acting like proxy Governments taxing the US Middle Classes to redistribute the wealth to areas they think are of benefit to mankind. Is this the right way to do things? I would suggest that is debatable.
The case of Musk is interesting.
In the field of space - the government program smoothly, steadily did less and less for more and more. The final insult in this progression is the SLS aka the Senate Launch System. Then along comes Musk and actually reduces prices - for increasing capability.
In the field of ZEV vehicles - governments haven been talking about them for decades. Furrowed brows and billions. A handful off barely usable prototypes result. Along comes Musk and start building them by the 100K. Refuelling an issue? Build a worldwide network of chargers....
In both cases, this is because his goals conflicted with those chosen by the government.
In space, the government wanted a vast sum of money to be distributed among the States according to politics pegging order. The actual throwing things upstairs bit was a minor by-product to them. So steadily inflating programs that did less and less were *good* - less chance of a failure to annoy the public.... Musk just wanted to make launch cheaper....
On ZEVs - government are hooked on oil worse than hillbillies on Oxy. Plus they didn't want electric vehicles, they want hydrogen - easier to tax and it props up the oil companies who were supposed to pivot into hydrogen. Musk just wanted to make electric cars cheaper and cheaper....
I could see Nicola doing this to try and distract from matters on the home front.
There's not really a downside to that for her, though.
Trump's about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit in Scotland, so he'd only be defended by the 'defend the indefensible' rent-a-quotes.
Exactly. Telling us how awful Trump is seems to be occupying just about everyone with access to a keyboard at the present time. I don't think it would save her but it would be widely praised.
Wow. I can’t remember the last time I read a thread header which made such an important point with such clarity. Well done Richard, a really excellent piece.
I can. It was yesterday's by @david_herdson. Today's is of the same high standard, as have been many of the recent headers. Well done all!
Thanks Ben. There are a good few people on here whose opinion I really respect, including yourself and DavidL, so it is nice when I put something out and it is not greeted with the expected howls of derision.
I could see Nicola doing this to try and distract from matters on the home front.
There's not really a downside to that for her, though.
Trump's about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit in Scotland, so he'd only be defended by the 'defend the indefensible' rent-a-quotes.
Exactly. Telling us how awful Trump is seems to be occupying just about everyone with access to a keyboard at the present time. I don't think it would save her but it would be widely praised.
There is the whole GlobalScot thang, of course. Conferred by Salmond, asd I am sure she will point out if the subject arises.
Yet non eu bands small and large have been able to tour in the uk with no problems over the years without free movement sounds like luvvie whinging to me
I suspect non-eu bands have been touring, but I bet they had to do the paperwork and permits first.
And why can say american bands manage that but some french band can't? Or some english band do it....can't be eu rules as eu rules were the same for much of the time as we were in the eu most of the last 20 years
AP Update - Final Overseas Ballots and Odds and Sods (technical term ) 99%+ Reporting
Warnock +88K .. Ossoff +50K
Mr Jack, do you have a source that provides a precise breakdown of the Military and Overseas ballots? My instinct is that it is marginally pro-Biden, but it is just an instinct and I'd like to know the real figures.
Not presently. The Georgia SoS will issue the overall numbers but the overseas ballots are not broken down between ex-pats and military. At the November GE exit poll Biden and Trump shared the military vote which was the best vote for a Dem POTUS candidate for decades. Strangely military folk weren't keen on Trump calling the fallen "losers"
One thing yours truly noticed in WA State March 2020 presidential primary, was that in a couple of on-base voting precincts at Joint Base Lewis McChord and Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, the top vote-getter was Bernie Sanders.
While William Jennings Bryan NEVER attempted to overthrow the Constitution, and indeed conceded (if not happily) THREE presidential election loses (a record for an actual nominee) there are a number of similarities between WSJ and DJT
> both excellent orators whose style and substance was WAY more appreciated by the unwashed masses of roll-over / fly-over country, than by the urban sophisticates of New York, Boston and Emporia, Kansas.
> both advocated major reforms of established economic and political systems and policies, naturally opposed by the establishment (except those who saw ways to profit from populism).
> both engendered strong personal loyalty from the followers, and fear & loathing from opponents
> both entertained strong personal beliefs appealing to their base but offputing to others (such as anti-evolutionism for Bryan)
> both began their political careers in one state (Nebraska for Bryan, New York for Trumpsky) but ended up moving to Florida
> both in their own unique ways were fashion trend-setters (Bryan the Palm Beach suit, Trumpsky the MAGA hat)
> both engaged in rather dubious property dealings (WJB in Florida real estate boom, DJT too many to mention)
Very good. And do you believe he is Baum’s lion, despite denial of the political metaphors?
Yet non eu bands small and large have been able to tour in the uk with no problems over the years without free movement sounds like luvvie whinging to me
This is not about US bands touring the UK
This is about UK musicians like Opera North touring the EU.
Or not, as it happens.
So answer a perfectly straightforward question, why can an american band happily fill out the paperwork but it is impossible for Opera north?
The arts are one sector where arguably Britain has a competitive advantage and much to offer. I'm not thinking just of the famous artists but all the many skills and trades that go into it. Silly to throw that away.
And this is a good illustration of loss of market.
Previously UK musicians could play anywhere in Europe without a visa.
Now they are restricted to the UK only.
"But they could tour Australia" will whine the Brexiteers.
Yes, they could. But they won't.
Absolute and total bollocks, they can still play in europe they just have to pick up a pen and fill in the same paperwork as non eu bands have managed for years. They have not been banned from playing in the EU
Why didn't we vaccinate frontline NHS first and tell 80+ to continue to shield for another month?
Because of an ill-informed belief that vaccinating the vulnerable is the quickest way to solve the crisis, when in fact it's vaccinating the key workers (with the most contacts) to contain the spread of the virus.
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
I think we need to massively promote FE colleges as an alternative to Universities, and a good route to future employment. I would call these elite FE colleges 'The Ivy League' (obviously borrowing from the US - I know that over there the term refers to their Oxbridge type Universities), and I would envisage a big sporting side, and even preppy uniforms (blazers and slacks) just to emphasise the difference. I think a lot of kids would like this.
Technically, The Ivy League is a sporting term: it refers to a group of universities that play against each other in certain college level sports.
I see Cruz is going the denial route, trying to divorce his playacting in the Senate from the context of Trump's actions and how it was helping to fuel the mob mentality that something could be done.
Hawley in not replying may be because he doesn't feel he can walk that tightrope like Cruz.
I'm not sure what repercussions they could realistically face though? They could be treated like pariahs by many other Republican Senators, but would they really affect them? Could they face funding consequences or something? Money seems to be all Senators think about.
I could see Nicola doing this to try and distract from matters on the home front.
There's not really a downside to that for her, though.
Trump's about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit in Scotland, so he'd only be defended by the 'defend the indefensible' rent-a-quotes.
Exactly. Telling us how awful Trump is seems to be occupying just about everyone with access to a keyboard at the present time. I don't think it would save her but it would be widely praised.
There is the whole GlobalScot thang, of course. Conferred by Salmond, asd I am sure she will point out if the subject arises.
Conferred by FM Jack McConnell as it happens. She may of course point this out...
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
I think we need to massively promote FE colleges as an alternative to Universities, and a good route to future employment. I would call these elite FE colleges 'The Ivy League' (obviously borrowing from the US - I know that over there the term refers to their Oxbridge type Universities), and I would envisage a big sporting side, and even preppy uniforms (blazers and slacks) just to emphasise the difference. I think a lot of kids would like this.
Technically, The Ivy League is a sporting term: it refers to a group of universities that play against each other in certain college level sports.
While William Jennings Bryan NEVER attempted to overthrow the Constitution, and indeed conceded (if not happily) THREE presidential election loses (a record for an actual nominee) there are a number of similarities between WSJ and DJT
> both excellent orators whose style and substance was WAY more appreciated by the unwashed masses of roll-over / fly-over country, than by the urban sophisticates of New York, Boston and Emporia, Kansas.
> both advocated major reforms of established economic and political systems and policies, naturally opposed by the establishment (except those who saw ways to profit from populism).
> both engendered strong personal loyalty from the followers, and fear & loathing from opponents
> both entertained strong personal beliefs appealing to their base but offputing to others (such as anti-evolutionism for Bryan)
> both began their political careers in one state (Nebraska for Bryan, New York for Trumpsky) but ended up moving to Florida
> both in their own unique ways were fashion trend-setters (Bryan the Palm Beach suit, Trumpsky the MAGA hat)
> both engaged in rather dubious property dealings (WJB in Florida real estate boom, DJT too many to mention)
Very good. And do you believe he is Baum’s lion, despite denial of the political metaphors?
While I think there may be something to the WOZ = Populist fable idea, doubt that Bryan was the Cowardly Lion.
Mostly because it doesn't seem to make much sense for a Populist like Baum to think of WJB in those terms in 1900, when Bryan ran a second time (just as passionately as the first) AND when the book was first published.
Yet non eu bands small and large have been able to tour in the uk with no problems over the years without free movement sounds like luvvie whinging to me
I suspect non-eu bands have been touring, but I bet they had to do the paperwork and permits first.
And why can say american bands manage that but some french band can't? Or some english band do it....can't be eu rules as eu rules were the same for much of the time as we were in the eu most of the last 20 years
Not sure what you mean, France and the UK were in the EU, so could work and tour anywhere in the eu. US wasn't, so couldn't.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
I linked the article about tesco's being taken to court by Levi's when I originally posted about it. Tesco's was told they weren't allowed to source levi jeans from outside of the eu.
Well now the EU can go to hell. Every time the EU causes trouble to the UK will just reinforce people views that we were right to leave..
While it seemed unlikely that 17 Republicans in the Senate would go along with Democrats to reach the two-thirds necessary for conviction, the anger at Mr. Trump was so palpable that party leaders said privately it was not out of the question.
Comments
Why has what Richard and that excellent article about the Simpsons describe happened and is there anything we can do about it?
The key for me is value added. Back in the day when labour was the largest element of a car manufacturer's costs and a lot of the work was done by skilled and semi skilled manual labour they added a lot, possibly most, of the value to the vehicle. As the mechanisation became more sophisticated many of these skilled jobs became semi skilled or simply disappeared altogether.
When communication was difficult, expensive and unreliable there was no choice in a services industry but to employ the local talent, even if there were other opportunities for that talent that drove the price they were able to charge. If everyone was doing the same these costs could be passed on to the customer creating a virtuous circle by which such well paid workers created demand for many other products creating yet more jobs.
What we have seen with globalisation is that those who have rare skills can operate in a larger market than before and demand an even higher premium on their services. But those who don't find themselves competing with those who can afford to live on substantially less because those around them charge a lot less for their ancillary services.
Furthermore, as the service industry is internationalised more and more of the money bleeds out of the local economy into other economies further away draining the demand for other services and goods.
At the moment those in the west who are not able to claim a premium still do pretty well. They do well because they live in economies that generate value and a reasonable chunk of that value comes down the foodchain. They also have the benefit of a society where most are reasonably educated and where there is a lot of inherited capital in terms of infrastructure which boosts the standard of living of the occupants. They do less well than they did and they do better than they are going to do as the capital stored in these wealthier countries is depleted.
In the 19th century for us and in the 20th century for the US free trade worked really well because the productivity of our and then their employees was so high that international competition stood little chance. Now we are the ones struggling to work out how people compete with the China's and India's and free trade is not working so well for a significant part of our society, even as the better skilled or talented make more money than ever from this phenomenon. As a result our societies become more divided, less equal and more alienated from each other.
On the whole, Germans do not own property, have very significant immigration and yet there is next to no chance of a Trump taking charge.
I half suspect it is more to do with the all or nothing electoral systems that creates division rather than anything in built in human nature.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
Even the Dutch and Scandos rent far more than the US and have far great immigration ?
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
52% of Germans now own their own home too, not much below the 63% in the UK who own their own home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
As for immigration the AfD is on 8-11% in the latest polls and for the first time since WW2 there is a party with representation in the Bundestag that is right of the CDU/CSU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2021_German_federal_election
Not something that can be said of all rental property in Britain, especially for the young.
I note Trunp's permanent suspension from Twitter has led a number of his supporters to end their Twitter accounts and go over to Parler.
This is a depressing and predictable sequence of events and is part of the deterioration of the political debate both in the United States and (mercifully not yet to the same extent) here.
The problem with Freedom of Speech isn't the freedom but the speech - that's a tad trite so I'll explain. Political debate should be about a plurality of views meeting in the virtual marketplace of ideas (sites like PB for example) where all views are heard but that requires those who posit opinions (on all sides and none) to be able to accept two principals - one that they may sometimes be wrong and two that sometimes their opponents may be right.
Without that basic concession, Freedom of Speech means nothing because all that happens is the equivalent of baseline tennis - each side hammers its opinion against the other. Sites become echo chambers where a majority viewpoint holds sway and dissenting views are chased out by repetition or frequency of objection. Going from Twitter to Parler makes the latter the new "home" for conservative debate but what's the point of conservatives, socialists, liberals, anarchists or whoever just debating with like-minded people?
"People like People like Themselves" and while the Internet and forums like this expose different viewpoints, they can become uncomfortable for those whose viewpoint doesn't fit "the majority".
"The voice of the people is the will of God." So did Alcuin advise Charlemagne, and it remains true today.
At least in this sense: when millions of people have genuine economic grievances, that are hold them, their children and communities back, or worse pushing them back, it is the clear duty AND self-interest of the state, the political system, the politicos AND citizen, to listen well, think hard and work to change things for the better.
The rise of Trumpskyism in our times, reminds me a lot of the rise of Populism in the 1890s which was also characterized by extreme angst, anger and agitation within the existing political system, but in direct conflict with the political establishment of BOTH major parties.
And while the Populist Party came to being, the REAL action was within the Democrats and Republicans. Most of the Dems ended up allied in 1896 with the Pops, though a powerful minority did not, including incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland. On the other hand, most Republicans opposed populism, either as a 3rd party OR within the GOP. The main fault line being Bimetalism = using both gold AND silver for US coins & currency, an inflationary policy (when money supply was VERY limited) supported by most farmers (and silver miners) but opposed by Wall Street, "Main Street" and manufacturers (and their workers).
It was the Bimetalism issue that propelled young Williams Jennings Bryan to the Democratic (and Populist) Party nomination in 1896, following his electrifying "Cross of Gold" speech to the Dem convention. WJB then criss-crossed America addressing record-setting crowds from coast to coast, while his Republican rival, William McKinley waged a classic "front porch" campaign. The result: McKinley won a decisive victory in 1896, and was re-elected in 1900, again running against Bryan. Who waged one more losing presidential campaign, in 1908 against Taft.
Bryan remained THE key figure in the Democratic Party from 1896 to 1912, an eloquent & persistent spokesman for rural America, it's interests and values, at a time when a once-rural, agricultural nation was fast becoming an urban, industrial powerhouse. Which is one reason why WJB split his party, because he had much less appeal to big-city workers and immigrants who were the heart of the urban Democratic Party.
In 1912, Bryan swung his support behind Woodrow Wilson because WW was a progressive, and WW when on to win the Presidency thanks to the split in the GOP between Taft and TR. Also, Wilson appealed to both rural Southerners AND many urban progressives (even if he's was not first choice of Tammany Hall and the like).
BUT it was not until the Great Depression AND the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, that Democrats found a leader who could unite most rural & urban Americans, most liberals & moderates and even some conservatives (esp. in South) into a lasting coalition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
Switzerland is largely a tax haven
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/aug/01/clothes.marketingandpr
Kind of suggests your original idea that home ownership was massively important is not always the case.
Maybe there are other things at play to make people feel dislocated from society.
Tesco could happily buy jeans, call them Tesco's Own Brand and sell them.
Arguably a lot of data processing, engineering and computing jobs will be done by robots. Train people for those sorts of jobs and it might end up being the equivalent of training people to work in Manchester mills just as those industries were moving to the Third World.
Agree with your general points though. I think we also need to be a lot less snobbish about some jobs. The key workers this last year have been people doing jobs that in other times a lot of people have disregarded and underpaid and have not wanted for their own children.
This is about UK musicians like Opera North touring the EU.
Or not, as it happens.
Previously UK musicians could play anywhere in Europe without a visa.
Now they are restricted to the UK only.
"But they could tour Australia" will whine the Brexiteers.
Yes, they could. But they won't.
Populist rightwing nationalism is more to do with rising rates of immigration than home ownership however, hence the Netherlands via the PVV, Sweden via the Swedish Democrats, Finland via the True Finns, Germany via the AfD and Denmark via the Danish Peoples' Party all have establised populist right parties represented in their Parliaments now
The fact is purely Levi's trying to protect their excess profits.
Frankly if a company outsources its production then it should have absolutely no protection against retailers outsourcing their wholesale supplier. That is just trying to have your cake and eat it
Trump's about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit in Scotland, so he'd only be defended by the 'defend the indefensible' rent-a-quotes.
> both excellent orators whose style and substance was WAY more appreciated by the unwashed masses of roll-over / fly-over country, than by the urban sophisticates of New York, Boston and Emporia, Kansas.
> both advocated major reforms of established economic and political systems and policies, naturally opposed by the establishment (except those who saw ways to profit from populism).
> both engendered strong personal loyalty from the followers, and fear & loathing from opponents
> both entertained strong personal beliefs appealing to their base but offputing to others (such as anti-evolutionism for Bryan)
> both began their political careers in one state (Nebraska for Bryan, New York for Trumpsky) but ended up moving to Florida
> both in their own unique ways were fashion trend-setters (Bryan the Palm Beach suit, Trumpsky the MAGA hat)
> both engaged in rather dubious property dealings (WJB in Florida real estate boom, DJT too many to mention)
It sort of doesn't matter at the moment, because we're staying at home anyway, but it can be hard for homeowners to realise quite how crap renting is in the UK.
https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1347936923260776448
In the field of space - the government program smoothly, steadily did less and less for more and more. The final insult in this progression is the SLS aka the Senate Launch System. Then along comes Musk and actually reduces prices - for increasing capability.
In the field of ZEV vehicles - governments haven been talking about them for decades. Furrowed brows and billions. A handful off barely usable prototypes result. Along comes Musk and start building them by the 100K. Refuelling an issue? Build a worldwide network of chargers....
In both cases, this is because his goals conflicted with those chosen by the government.
In space, the government wanted a vast sum of money to be distributed among the States according to politics pegging order. The actual throwing things upstairs bit was a minor by-product to them. So steadily inflating programs that did less and less were *good* - less chance of a failure to annoy the public.... Musk just wanted to make launch cheaper....
On ZEVs - government are hooked on oil worse than hillbillies on Oxy. Plus they didn't want electric vehicles, they want hydrogen - easier to tax and it props up the oil companies who were supposed to pivot into hydrogen. Musk just wanted to make electric cars cheaper and cheaper....
Can't help noticing that a horse referred to as a dobbin is almost invariably a gelding.
Hawley in not replying may be because he doesn't feel he can walk that tightrope like Cruz.
I'm not sure what repercussions they could realistically face though? They could be treated like pariahs by many other Republican Senators, but would they really affect them? Could they face funding consequences or something? Money seems to be all Senators think about.
She may of course point this out...
Unlikely to win the general but could win the base
Mostly because it doesn't seem to make much sense for a Populist like Baum to think of WJB in those terms in 1900, when Bryan ran a second time (just as passionately as the first) AND when the book was first published.
NYTimes