Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson: Spirit Level Lessons
Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson outline a plan for a new progressive government to tackle inequality
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Tax
An Era of Chronic Uncertainty: Time for Basic Income
By Guy Standing We are living in an age of chronic uncertainty, in which crises pile into one another, plunging millions of people deeper into insecurity, impoverishment, stress and ill-health. There was the financial crash of 2008, a decade of austerity, a series of six pandemics culminating in Covid, with more to follow, and now
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Rishi Sunak’s market moralism
Overshadowed by the appalling news from Ukraine, Chancellor Rishi Sunak presented the annual Mais Lecture in London a couple of weeks ago. Traditionally used by Chancellors (and, sometimes, Shadow Chancellors) as a space to fill out the detail of their economic plans, and (they hope) give the impression of some depth of thought behind them,
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Labour should not back another Job Furlough
The policy is uniquely flawed, with multiple faults. Of course, if government throws over £60 billion of subsidies to a minority of firms and workers, that will be popular with the recipients. But a scheme should be judged by what it does for the many, not the few, and for its opportunity cost.
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Interview with socialist Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s economic advisor, Stephany Griffith-Jones
PEF Council member Prof. Stephany Griffiths-Jones is a member of Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s group of economic advisors. With Boric winning a resounding victory in the Chilean Presidential elections, we reproduce here a translation of Stephany’s recent interview for CTIX magazine Chile. Conducted before the second round of the election, Stephany discusses the left’s economic
Care and the Pandemic: a comment in reply to Sue Himmelweit
For three hundred years, care work and care labour have been woefully trivialised or ignored by economists. One is inclined to think this is partly due to the domination of the subject by men until recently. But it is also true that the subject is incredibly complex, partly because the very idea of ‘care’ is
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Where Has All the Money Gone?
Quantitative easing risks generating its own boom-and-bust cycles, and can thus be seen as an example of state-created financial instability. Governments must abandon the fiction that central banks create money independently from government, and must themselves spend the money created at their behest.
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Should we tax wealth to fund social care?
PEF Council members recently discussed, via email, the government’s plans for social care and its financing. We were unanimous in agreeing on the bad design of the scheme, on the absence of real funding and reform for social care. And we also agreed on the need for a significant shift in the balance of taxation
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Social care and the Tories’ raid on paypackets
The Conservative government looks set to announce that it will be introducing a rise in National Insurance Contributions of up to 1.25 percent on Tuesday this week. The intention is to raise around £10bn to attempt to staunch the crisis in social care – a crisis, it should be added, of the government’s own making,
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New PEF publication – guide to Joe Biden’s economic programme
The Progressive Economy Forum is today publishing a detailed new guide to the economic programme of the Joe Biden administration. In less than six months since his inauguration as US President, Joe Biden’s administration has staked out a new agenda for US policymaking, breaking with the previous four decades of Republican and Democratic domestic economic
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