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Weekend reading, 29 October 2010

Friday, October 29th, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Jon Cruddas - Taking Back the Big Society
A rich, sprawling and very worthwhile speech from UK MP Cruddas, the unofficial leader of the Labour left over there. A few extracts:

Across Europe social democracy has been reduced to parties of the public sector and the liberal middle class.

. . . The task at hand is for Labour to rebuild its identity grounded in ordinary, everyday working class culture.

. . . Labour built new schools and hospitals; a massive social investment. An historic achievement. No-one seems very grateful.

Labour in government pursued efficiency, ‘value for money’, and ‘customer satisfaction’ but it did not take care of the human relationships and trust that lie at the heart of public services. It used the market and the state as heartless instruments of reform. People felt excluded. They did not feel an ownership of the new grand buildings.

With embarrassing speed the Conservatives detached Labour from its own achievements. The market failure of the banks was turned into a crisis of public debt and blamed on Labour.

. . . In our history Labour has always responded to dispossession; to economic and social loss. It must do so again by rediscovering a warmth and generosity; especially in England by learning from our previous generations who have all dealt with the same patterns of loss. As such, Labour’s Good Society lies deep in the English struggle for popular democracy. (Read more)

John Kearne – Decline, fall and rebirth
This lengthy essay from The Australian presents an account of the history and evolution of social democracy and asks whether we are “living through a rare period of rupture” in which social democracy will be eclipsed by the green movement. Kearne traces some similar developments to those I’ve discussed in my Theoretical Foundations series of posts, though perhapsin a pithier style.

John Quiggin - Cosmopolitan social democracy

The left needs to offer a transformational vision of a better society if it is to motivate the kind of enthusiasm needed to overcome a rightwing politics of tribalism and (often misperceived) self-interest . . . We need a world view that extends the solidarity of social democracy to the whole of humanity. (Read more)

Dan Hind - The Media, the crisis, and the crisis in media
An intriguing suggestion from Hind, a former publisher and now author:

Clearly the media are in crisis. But if the current system doesn’t work, and the widely circulated proposals for reform won’t make a significant difference, what should we do? In The Return of the Public I make the case for a system of public commissioning. Instead of relying exclusively on professional commissioning editors all citizens take some responsibility for directing journalistic inquiry ourselves.

. . . To fund this system of public commissioning a sum of money could be taken from tax revenues or from licence fees and allocated to regional trusts. Journalists, academics and citizen researchers would post proposals for funding with these trusts . . . The public would then vote for the proposals that it wanted to support. (Read more)

Gordon Campbell – On The Hobbit finale
I’m not keen to get drawn into all the ins and outs of Hobbit-gate on this site, but this suggestion from Campbell, the veteran political columnist now with Scoop, was rather interesting:

In one important sense, The Hobbit experience has given New Zealand a second chance. What LOTR offered was an opportunity to build an entire industry off the back of what Peter Jackson had achieved. We could have created a wide ranging knowledge industry of a sort that bypassed the usual tyranny of New Zealand’s distance from its markets. Almost by accident from a national planning point of view, the film industry could have become exactly the sort of business cluster that Harvard University marketing guru Michael Porter had – decades ago – urged New Zealand to create.

Did we take full advantage of that opportunity? Hardly. . . . successive governments have left the private player (Jackson) to do all the heavy lifting, while keeping the Film Commission on starvation rations . . . We have a world leading FX shop, and little else of any stature . . . Keeping The Hobbit now gives us a second chance to re-balance the mix, because film seems to be what we do best. It is our knowledge economy forte.

This is not a case of picking winners. The winner, in the shape of Weta Digital at least, has already galloped past the post and picked up the Cup for being a globally recognized star performer. The strategy now should be to seriously fund and foster the growth of spinoffs – in gaming, in animation, design shops etc – that will enable the industry to expand out horizontally. To pull its weight properly in this process the Film Commission needs more funding – under conditions that ensure it meets cultural and commercial objectives from micro-budget features to mainstream theatrical releases. (Read more)

Paul Krugman - Falling Into the Chasm
Martin Wolf – Why US voters are suing Dr Obama
Krugman:

If Democrats do as badly as expected in next week’s elections, pundits will rush to interpret the results as a referendum on ideology. President Obama moved too far to the left, most will say . . . But the truth is that if the economic situation were better — if unemployment had fallen substantially over the past year — we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Wolf:

With a political stalemate expected, further action will now be blocked. A lost decade seems quite likely. That would be a calamity for the US – and the world.

Also:
John Kay – Why you can have an economy of people who don’t sweat
Jake Brewer – The Tragedy of Political Advocacy

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Weekend reading, 22 October 2010

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Ben Baumberg – Should we defend the middle class welfare state?
An interesting and challenging post on Left Foot Forward from Ben Baumberg of the LSE and the group-blog Inequalities. He concludes:

[UK Labour leader Ed] Miliband somehow needs to avoid several temptations: not to give in to the siren call of means-testing everything, nor to universally defend universalism. To help him in this, we need to think through the welfare state systematically, rating the impact of targeting and means-testing against a complete set of principles – and come up with a plan for targeted universalism that is both affordable and which defends the key achievements of the middle-class welfare state.

John Quiggin - Five Zombie Economic Ideas That Refuse to Die
Progressive Australian economist John Quiggin has a new book out called Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us which looks interesting and accessible. This article from Foreign Policy provides a useful introduction to some of what he has to say.

Big Cake – What if greenies are right? Growth: we can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Another great TED talk
Local blogger (and friend of Policy Progress) Big Cake’s take on Tim Jackson (who I discussed here).

OECD - Business as usual is not an option
Interesting to see this from as ‘establishment’ an organisation as the OECD:

“Business as usual” is not an option. That’s why the OECD is developing a Green Growth Strategy to help governments design and implement policies that can shift our economies onto greener growth paths. Central to this is identifying sources of growth which make much lighter claims on the biosphere. This will require fundamental changes to the structure of our economies, by creating new green industries, cleaning up polluting sectors and transforming consumption patterns.

Seth Godin – What does ‘pro-business’ mean?
Author Seth Godin makes a distinction between ‘pro-business’ policies and ‘pro-factory’ policies.

Also:
David Cunliffe – Cactus Kate on FDI
No Right Turn – Choice
Keith Ng - Did you know we’re in a recession?
John Kay - Barbarians at the gates of complexity
Matthew Yglesias – Global Economic Impact of Immigration

And on the ‘to read’ pile:
Brendan Mai, John Janssen, Geoff Lewis, Simon McLoughlin - Taking on the West Island: How does New Zealand’s labour productivity stack up? (New Zealand Treasury Productivity Paper 10/01)

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Weekend reading, 15 October 2010

Friday, October 15th, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Tony Wright (ippr) – Where next? The challenge for centre-left politics (hat-tip: NBH)
Tony Wright is a recently-retired UK Labour MP who now teaches public policy at University College London. His ideas have a bit in common with some of the other writers of similar pedigree I’ve discussed, like Purnell and Liddle. Here are a few extracts:

There are interesting ideas emerging about a transparent ratio between earners at the top and bottom of an organisation. Discussion of tax levels should no longer be off-limits either.

Nor does the idea of an active industrial policy seem quite so old-fashioned now . . . This is not a matter of the state propping up industries that are in decline, or even of ‘picking winners’: it is a matter of stimulating new technologies, promoting business networks and ensuring sources of finance.

. . . It is already clear that behind the immediate fiscal crisis there are long-term ambitions to re-order the relationship between the state and the market. The centre left will be required to remake the case for collective provision of services on grounds both of equity and efficiency, and for the taxation necessary to pay for them. This will require rather more intellectual and political confidence than was required during the New Labour years, when the cash cow of financial capitalism could be relied on for its painless largesse.

. . . The style of politics matters too. It should be open and inclusive, not imposed and manufactured. New Labour eventually (but inevitably) paid a high price for a style of politics that was more about responding to the party’s disputatious past than fostering an engaged democracy.

John Carney – A Primer On The Foreclosure Crisis
Bernard Hickey drew my attention to this column about a worrying new economic problem emerging in the US:

Ever since the housing bubble burst, there have been signs that there are serious problems with foreclosure practices. In some cases, the financial institution claiming it owns the mortgage has not been able to produce the underlying loan documents . . . what really kicked off the latest developments was the deposition of a GMAC loan officer named Jeffrey Stephan. . . he signed off on up to 10,000 foreclosure documents a month for five years. He said that he hadn’t reviewed the mortgage or foreclosure documents thoroughly. He quickly became known by the pejorative “robo-signer” for this way of getting mortgages through.

. . . Banks concerned about the recovery values of their mortgage portfolios and higher capital requirements, may pull back lending even further than they already have. In short, this could be the beginning of the second leg of the credit crunch.

Paul Krugman – What We Learn From Search Models
Matt Nolan (TVHE) – Nobel 2010
This year’s ‘Nobel Prize’ in Economics goes to Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides for their work on search models of unemployment. You can read a bit about that work in these articles.

George Monbiot – The Values Of Everything (hat-tip: Fleur)
I’m not totally sold on environmental activist George Monbiot, but in his latest column he outlines a rather interesting new book:

Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology . . . By changing our perception of what is normal and acceptable, politics alters our minds as much as our circumstances. Free, universal health provision, for example, tends to reinforce intrinsic values. Shutting the poor out of healthcare normalises inequality, reinforcing extrinsic values. The sharp rightward shift which began with Margaret Thatcher and persisted under Blair and Brown, all of whose governments emphasised the virtues of competition, the market and financial success, has changed our values.

. . . Common Cause proposes a simple remedy: that we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. Progressive campaigners, it suggests, should help to foster an understanding of the psychology which informs political change and show how it has been manipulated. They should also come together to challenge forces – particularly the advertising industry – which make us insecure and selfish.

Also:
Clint Smith (Parliamentary Library) – The next oil shock?
Brad DeLong – What Does Cutting-Edge Macroeconomics Tell Us About Economic Policy for the Recovery?
Martin Wolf – Why America is going to win the global currency battle
The Guardian – Calm and forceful Ed Miliband impresses at PMQs
The Dom Post – Capital goes green and cuddly
The Dom Post – Choat vows to fight further cuts to spending

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Weekend reading, 8 October 2010

Friday, October 8th, 2010


A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

“Begun the Currency wars have” – Raf Manji

Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism) – Currency War Threats Escalating
Matthew Yglesias – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Currency Wars
Raj Manji -The Art of Currency War
David E. Sanger and Michael Wines (New York Times) – More Countries Adopt China’s Tactics on Currency
Phil Izzo (Wall Street Journal) – Stiglitz: Central Banks Creating ‘Chaos’
Matt Nolan (The Visible Hand in Economics)  - Race to the bottom actually race to the top
Bernard Hickey – Opinion: Why NZ can’t step aside and wait to be slaughtered in the currency wars to come
Bernard Hickey – Five ways to control the NZ$ and capital flows
So what has been the big news story this week? Paul Henry? Chris Carter? The Hobbit? Um, how about the threat of competitive currency devaluations amongst the leading economies? Last week Brazil’s finance minister Guido Mantega introduced the phrase “currency war” into the discussion and it seems to have stuck. The range of articles above provides a pretty good introduction to the issues and differing views about the implications (and they include links to further articles). (Note – Raf Manji is an occasional commenter here at Policy Progress.)

Amidst the potential turmoil, Bernard Hickey offers a New Zealand perspective:

There is a significant risk that as central banks in the Northern Hemisphere crank up into a series of competitive devaluations that the New Zealand dollar is pushed up vs the US dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen, but not versus the Australian dollar.

. . . Luckily for New Zealand exporters to Australia, the one currency more in demand than our own is the Australian dollar.

But in the end that won’t save us. Our trade with China, now our second largest trading partner, is in US dollars and the Chinese are reluctant to let their currency appreciate vs the US dollar.

. . . If the New Zealand dollar surges under the weight of capital inflows from carry-trading, yield-hunting investors and those hunting for safety away from the money printing, then the Reserve Bank needs to be ready to sell New Zealand dollars. It worked before in 2007 and made the taxpayer a tidy profit. It can work again.

Simon Kennedy (Bloomberg) - Wall Street Sees World Economy Decoupling From U.S.
B’vedeni Snapshot – Food, glorious food! Will food become the new crude?
Meanwhile, some other emerging signs on the world economy front look more hopeful. From Bloomberg:

A book published last week by the World Bank . . . “The Day After Tomorrow” concludes that developing nations aren’t only decoupling, they also are undergoing a “switchover” that will make them such locomotives for the world economy, they can help rescue advanced nations. Among the reasons for the revolution are greater trade between emerging markets, the rise of the middle class and higher commodity prices, the book said.

And from B’vedeni Private Wealth (hat-tip Alison):

A decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine a world where giant multinationals and cashed up venture capitalists were battling each other for a share of the world’s fertiliser, irrigation water, and soybean markets. Yet today almost everything to do with large scale agriculture and the marketing and processing of agricultural products is a much sought after investment prospect.

Patrick Diamond - Labour’s failed renewal campaign
The Policy Network’s Patrick Diamond was one of those who accused Eurpoean progressives of “the politics of evasion”. Here’s what he has had to say about the Labour leadership contest in the UK:

At a deeper level, the contest has suffered from lack of sustained reflection about why the theories of social democracy – a stakeholder economy, democratic reform and an ethical foreign policy – proved so difficult to achieve in practice, despite three huge majorities. That insufficient work was done in opposition before 1997 is all too apparent. Only in Mr Blair’s second term did he develop a compelling reform mission, but even then Labour proved notoriously reluctant to challenge powerful institutional interests in the City, the media and public services. New Labour’s mind-set was one in which making enemies risked ceding electoral advantage to the Conservatives. But why this was, and how it stopped it governing in the public interest, has barely been discussed. As a result, whoever emerges as leader will likely lack a mandate to overhaul Labour’s programme.

And:

. . .  the current contest could have done with louder calls, for instance, to escalate Britain’s faltering war on poverty. But the mind-set that the state and social justice are inescapably linked remains, when it should be discarded . . . Labour’s next leader must deliver a radical speech that breaks out of the impasse created by the campaign. Their task will not be to detoxify their brand, as Mr Cameron fought to do, but to seek a dramatic new Clause 4 moment – one that once and for all announces an end to Labour’s fixation with traditional state power, and makes it again the party of moral, not mechanical reform.

Note: (free) registration is required for access to this Financial Times article.

A few other dispatches from the UK, following on from our Ed Miliband special edition last week:

And, on the ‘To Read’ pile:

And finally, a reminder: if you haven’t voted in the local body elections yet, you can still hand-deliver your ballot paper to a polling booth by midday tomorrow; check your local council website for details. (And if you live in Wellington or in the neighbouring areas covered by Capital and Coast, then as an added bonus you can vote for me for election to the District Health Board!)

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Weekend reading, 1 October 2010

Friday, October 1st, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Anthony Giddens and Martin Rees – Wake the world
Since my column this week focussed on Anthony Giddens, it seems appropriate to highlight this post on the excellent NZ-based Sciblogs site, which he has co-authored. As well as his earlier work on Third Way, Giddens has gone on to write The Politics of Climate Change (2009), while Rees is president of the Royal Society. From the post:

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that the core scientific findings about human-induced climate change and the dangers it poses for our collective future remain intact. The most important relevant fact is based on uncontroversial measurements: the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is higher than it has been for at least the last half-million years. It has risen by 30 per cent since the start of the industrial era, mainly because of the burning of fossil fuels. If the world continues to depend on fossil fuels to the extent it does today, carbon dioxide will reach double pre-industrial levels within the next half-century. This build-up is triggering long-term warming, the physical reasons for which are well-known and demonstrable in the laboratory.

Will Hutton – Extract: Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality – Why We Need a Fair Society
Andrew Marr – Start the Week with Andrew Marr (27/09/10) featuring Will Hutton, Lars Kroijer, Billy Ivory and Ronit Avni
Claire Armitstead – Guardian Books podcast (24/09/10): Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton
Meanwhile, Giddens’ interlocutor in my column, Will Hutton, has a new book out in the UK, and it looks like it could be an important one. I’ve previously linked to a trial run of the its arguments in a lecture Hutton gave at the London School of Economics late last year. The book is called Them and Us and in it Hutton aims to place ‘fairness’ at the heart of political discourse. The Observer has published an extract, and here are a few snippets from that:

We need a shared understanding of what constitutes fairness in order to restore our society. At present, there is none. The rich argue that it is fair for them to be so wealthy, in much the same way as Athenian noblemen believed that their riches were signifiers of their worth. They believe they owe little or nothing to society, government or public institutions. They accept no limit or proportionality to their wealth, benchmarking themselves only against their fellow rich. Philanthropic giving is declining; tax avoidance is rising; and executive pay is rising exponentially. All three are justified by the doctrine that the rich simply deserve to be rich.

And:

The principle of “just deserts” is a key part of our culture. We are not flat-earth egalitarians. But nor do we share the view held by the private-equity or hedge-fund partner in Mayfair that wealth is a signifier of personal worth in its own right. We believe it has to be earned, and we believe the rewards should be commensurate with the discretionary effort. Proportionality is a key value. Its trashing by those at the top of the financial and business community risks an angry populist backlash fuelled not by envy, as they airily claim, but by a visceral human instinct.

This last point is an important one, I think. Over recent years the Right, here and elsewhere, has been very effective at reframing any concerns about the disproportionate growth in income at the top as being about envy. When, as Hutton points out, it is actually about fairness.

Hutton elaborates on these points in an interview on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week radio show, which you can listen to on an audio file. (You can also subscribe to the Start the Week podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/stw.) He is also featured on last week’s Guardian Books audio alongside the highly-regarded Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, whose new book The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? also looks very interesting. And he is giving a new Royal Society for the Arts lecture next week, which will also be available by podcast.

Matthew Yglesias – Zero Tolerance Done Right

The commonplace scenario in the United States when people decide to “get tough” and implement a policy of “zero tolerance” for infractions of the rules is to in practice tolerate the majority of infractions by not catching perpetrators and then hit a minority of violators with extremely harsh sanctions. For years now, Mark Kleiman has been pushing the reverse approach — make sanctions relatively mild, but make them swift and nearly certain. He teams up with Kirk Humphreys to describe a version of this that’s led to a sharp reduction in South Dakota’s drunk driving fatalities . . . [read more]

Dani Rodrik – In (some) economists’ topsy turvy world, cutting firing costs will decrease unemployment – except it won’t

I hope someone from the IMF or OECD – the two institutions responsible for convincing the Spaniards that such a reform is an urgent priority – will explain to me how reducing the cost of firing workers can lower unemployment in the midst of a decline in labour demand. [read more]

And I also have a couple of recommendations from others to pass on:

Charles Taylor – Solidarity in a Pluralist Age
The Canadian philosopher and social theorist on the challenge to progressivism from increasing population diversity.

Mark Harris (New York Magazine) – Inventing Facebook
I hadn’t realised that The Social Network, the upcoming movie about Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, was written by Aaron Sorkin. I love The West Wing and am a keen Facebook user, so I’m now really looking forward to this film!

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Weekend reading, 24 September 2010

Friday, September 24th, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Gavin Kelly and Nick Pearce – Wanted: an old, new left

Although pitched at a UK audience, this prospect magazine article by two former Downing St advisors (one of whom is now director of the Institute for Public Policy Research) is essential reading for New Zealand progressives as well. They begin their analysis this way:

Historically, social democracy has succeeded when it has achieved two things: first, when it has raised the living standards of the broad mass of the population; and second, when it has complemented this “materialism” with a national popular project, embedded in the cultural aspirations and attachments of the British people. Today, neither of these components is in place.

I encourage you to go and read the full article! It raises some really important challenges, many of which have points in common with things that David Craig and I have written at this site.

Matthew Yglesias – Challenging The Public Sector To Be All It Can Be

An interesting post by US blogger Yglesias where he counsels against getting caught up with the underlying structural inequalities and barriers in society to the extent that we lose sight of the ability of existing public initiatives to make practical incremental change.

Paul Krugman – Brother, Can You Paradigm?

Leading progressive economist Paul Krugman argues that our current economic travails were perfectly predictable using good old-fashioned Keynesian analysis.

Patrick Wintour (Guardian) – Labour leadership ballot closes with Miliband brothers neck and neck

But who will win? We’ll find out this weekend!

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Weekend reading, 17 September 2010

Friday, September 17th, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Rethinking welfare for the twenty-first century – conference presentations
Welfare policy issues are very topical right now, with the Key government’s Welfare Working Group (WWG) process underway. This webpage from the recent conference hosted by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and the Retirement Policy and Research Centre (Auckland University) contains a wealth of presentations from speakers including Susan St John, Mike O’Brien (of the Alternative WWG), Cindy Kiro and Keith Rankin.

Also well worth reading are dissections of the WWG discussion document from CPAG and the Alternative WWG’s Paul Dalziel.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Daily Telegraph) – The backlash begins against the world landgrab
Fascinating stuff:

Last week’s long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence.

As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China, the Pacific Rim, and even India are trying to lock up chunks of the world’s future food supply. Western agribusiness is trying to beat them to it. Western funds – many listed on London’s AIM exchange – are in turn trying to beat them.

I wonder if this is relevant to developments in New Zealand. In any case, the author concludes:

Land is not a commodity. It has an atavistic pull in most cultures, and is semi-sacred everywhere. Absentee landlords who amass chunks of the earth – however well-intentioned – will be expropriated. Politics always prevails.

(Hat-tip: Bernard Hickey)

Also:
An optimist’s errata: now there’s a novel solution (hat-tip: Paul)
What’s the difference, Mili-brothers?
Beautiful fractals and ugly inequality (hat-tip: Paul Krugman)

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Weekend reading, 10 September 2010

Friday, September 10th, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

Ha-Joon Chang – 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (RSA lecture) (audio)

23 Things is the new book by Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang, the author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), and it looks pretty good; the tone, apparently, is light-hearted but the intent is serious. This recent RSA lecture provides a useful ‘taster’ for the book. Some of the ‘things they don’t tell you’ from the book that he focuses on in his lecture include ‘There is no such thing as free market’, ‘The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet’ and ‘Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer.’ If you’re not so keen on podcasts, Chang also writes  for the Guardian from time to time (see e.g. We lost sight of fairness in the false promise of wealth and UK needs a selective industrial policy); and they also published a review of his book by John (False Dawn) Gray.

Jeff Madrick – ‘The Case for Big Government’ – First Chapter

Another interesting-looking book, albeit a little older, is The Case for Big Government (2008) by The New School’s Jeff Madrick. Its first chapter is available online courtesy of the New York Times. A sample:

The popular economic case against big government, including the more moderate Democratic version, does not stand up to the evidence. Big-government and high-tax nations do not grow systematically more slowly than nations with lower government spending as a proportion of the economy and lower tax rates. More precisely, big-government and high-tax nations elsewhere simply do not in the real world automatically undermine the capacity to produce more for an extra hour of work — its productivity. Peter Lindert of the University of California at Davis spent years compiling data on the subject in a 2004 book. There is, he concludes, a dramatic “conflict between intuition and evidence. It is well-known that higher taxes and transfers reduce productivity. Well-known — but unsupported by statistics and history.”

Conversely, Madrick argues:

Without an active government, a nation cannot respond adequately to its times. If it does not respond to new conditions, both economic growth and the ability to retain a nation’s values will suffer. In the laboratory of the real world, the governments of rich nations have on balance been central to economic growth, and in the process have retained their citizens’ faith in their nations’ promise and social values. Does this mean government must be big? The lesson is that pragmatic government should prevail over any categorical or typically ideological dismissal of the uses of government, including Bill Clinton’s. If what we think of as big government is necessary to manage change, and in a complex society it may well be, then we should pursue it actively and positively, and make it function well.

Matthew Yglesias - Government Efficiency Matters a Lot and Does The Money Have to Come From Somewhere?

My favourite US blogger does a nice demolition of a Cato Institute commentator’s claim that “how efficiently government provides services is less important than deciding what services government should provide”, and uses an example about counterfeiters to justify his stimulus proposal. Speaking of Yglesias, I was chuffed last weekend to find that he had posted a ‘tweet’ plugging Bill Verrall’s recent guest-post about Pakistan. While my references to him tend to focus on economic and domestic policy, Yglesias has written extensively on foreign affairs, including a book entitled Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.

Idiot/Savant (No Right Turn) – Investing in the future

The mysterious and prolific author of the No Right Turn blog covers Labour’s policy developments as reported by Colin James (and summarised in my Commentary round-up this week).

Carl Miller (Demos) – Conspiracy theories are an issue progressives can no longer ignore

A post on Left Foot Forward promoting a new Demos report on conspiracy theories and why progressives should be concerned about them.

Trevor Mallard (Red Alert) – General debate – Adams on quake

And finally, a nice reflection of the non-partisan air that has accompanied discussion of the Canterbury earthquake: Trevor highlights a speech by National’s MP for Selwyn, Amy Adams.

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Weekend reading – looking back over the first six months

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

A version of this list of recommendations also comes out earlier in the day as part of the weekly Policy Progress e-newsletter.

In keeping with this week’s commemoration of Policy Progress reaching the 6 months mark, I thought it might be interesting to plunge into the past for this week’s recommendations. Each of the following were originally included in early editions of my e-newsletter, back before I began republishing those recommendations on the blog. So, for all of the material below, this will be its first appearance on the World-Wide Web!

My first-ever recommendation from 26 February 2010:

Rod Oram – Epoch-defining insight … and the govt missed it

Rod Oram’s Sunday Star-Times column is back, and his first column for 2010 is a particularly good one. For me, it really seems to bring together a number of his recent key themes.

From 12 March 2010:

Matthew Taylor – Prison works, or at least, it can do

Matthew Taylor is an interesting guy. He used to be an advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, and now he’s the chief executive of the 250-year-old Royal Society for the Arts. His blog isn’t as high-profile or widely-read as some others in Britain, but I frequently find it worthwhile and thought-provoking. This post is likely to have raised hackles within both camps of the law & order debate.

2 April 2010:

Matthew Yglesias – The End of Big Government Liberalism

Yglesias is a US blogger who I read pretty regularly. He blogs professionally, being employed by the Center for American Progress think-tank as part of their Think Progress project. He is one of those annoying guys who, at the age of 28, seems to already be able to often insightful comments on just about any policy area under the sun. Very intimidating! Anyway, this post has a somewhat provocative argument that, while framed in the US context, is intended to apply more universally. It’s probably a good idea to read his follow-up post Fighting About Modes of Delivery, where he clarifies a few of his points, alongside this one.

30 April 2010:

John Quiggin – After the Dead Horses and A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

I’ve been conscious over the last few months that this section was heavy on Brits and Yanks but didn’t have any Australians, and I aim to correct that. John Quiggin is an economist at the University of Queensland and the author of a number of books, including the forthcoming Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us. These posts seem to herald a new focus on progressive renewal that fits well with our Theoretical Foundations theme. I’ve already linked to the earlier of the two (and Matthew Yglesias’s response) in yesterday’s post, but I suspect this is a thread I’ll be coming back to a bit in future. Also, any recommendations of other Australian authors I should follow would be most welcome (I’m looking at people who write stuff of general application rather than commentary on the Australian political scene).

And, finally, 18 June 2010 (appropriate to this week’s column):

Martin Wolf – The grasshoppers and the ants – a modern fable and elucidating the fable

Paul Krugman – The Pain Caucus

Robert Reich – Several factors point to double-dip recession (audio)

Brad DeLong – What’s in the Cards for Our Economy?

The Age (Australia) – ‘Act two’ of crisis begins: Soros

Predicting the economy, especially the world economy, is a tricky business, and not one I’d want to enter into lightly. But it does seem to be that there has been a crystallising of negativity amongst some of the economic writers I most respect, at the same time that the mainstream media (at least here in New Zealand) seems to be saying “okay crisis over, time to move on”. There are some different shades of opinion presented in these US and UK columns and blogs. Robert Reich (Clinton’s former Secretary of Labour) warns a double-dip recession is looming, whereas Brad DeLong feels the more likely scenario is a Japanese-style ‘lost decade’ of low growth. Either way it doesn’t sound good.

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled round of recommendations next week!

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Coming up this week

Monday, August 30th, 2010

My Tuesday column this week is on economic prospects and what they mean for progressives. And I’ve got a couple of really interesting guest-posts coming through in the next few days, so will aim to publish one of those on Thursday.

Also – we’ve reached what I think is a noteworthy milestone: six months of Policy Progress!

To mark this, I thought it would be a nice idea to re-post one of my earlier blog posts (or guest-posts), which newer readers might not have seen, each day this week. I’ve a few candidates in mind, but am also open to suggestions!

PS If you’re in Auckland, get along to this tonight!

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