Knowing and Making

Lots to write about today, but not much time. Here are the topics. See if you can spot the connection: The myth of hollowing-out. Frank Furedi (see Tuesday's post) gave an interesting talk but I still see this as the main flaw in his argument. I have started to work on some more concrete theory to help quantify the contribution the knowledge economy makes to consumer benefit. Government intervention/rescue of businesses. Jaguar in particular - definitely a firm on the "productive" side of Furedi's distinction - is a candidate for some kind of financial assistance. Can government choose the right businesses to rescue or set specific criteria for doing so? What should it get in return? Zero interest rates. At some point it isn't the price of money that stops people borrowing or lending; it's the challenge of paying it back. What else can the state do other than print money? Related topic: what should people do with their fiscal stimulus? More to the point, what ...

This evening I am going to see a lecture by Frank Furedi, "The Political Significance of the Economic Crisis". It's at the LSE but despite that, there doesn't seem to be a lot of economics in it. Here is Prof. Furedi's article in Spiked in which he outlines the argument that I imagine he'll discuss tonight. A couple of sentences really put me on edge: Without the securitisation and financialisation of the economy, the accumulation of capital and a sense of prosperity could not have been maintained in Britain and the US. Outwardly it appeared that economies such as Britain’s and America’s were doing well during the past decade. By the time of the credit crunch, the financial sector accounted for around 30 per cent of the British economy. On both sides of the Atlantic, industry continued to decline. This is another variant of the myth that our economy is based on some kind of pyramid scheme where everyone thinks they are making something but actually nobody is....